Forging New
Connexions
A new generation of policy leaders learns the ropes The ATM and innovative leadership Window on the universe
Inside
RICE SALLYPORT • The magazine of rice university • FALL 2006
2 President’s Message • 3 Letters • 4 Through the Sallyport D e p a r t m e n t s
14 Students • 40 Arts • 44 On the Bookshelf 46 Who’s Who • 50 Scoreboard
can credit 11 You experienced surgeons
bid, and 5 Design, build: While this is
for part of the decline in cancer mortality rates.
the traditional way to construct a building, does it still work?
the ink is dry, we 41 Ifshouldn’t play it.
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Battling dengue fever with a new vaccination technique.
What do public advertisements in China tell us about a country in transition?
depictions of disease 8 Do on film promote negative images of racism and sexuality?
settings, 4 Romantic gourmet dining, haute
It’s sure to make 9 Fear: you think.
couture, and the Rice School of Architecture Paris.
12 School 42 Shepherd alums brighten the
lives of children from an underprivileged community.
of us believe 6 Most education broadens an
individual’s perspective and helps diminish racist attitudes, but just the opposite may be true.
18 Hands-On Learning: The Baker Institute’s Summer in D.C. Internship Program F e a t u r e s
Young policy leaders learn the ropes through an innovative internship program that takes them to the heart of Washington, D.C.
32 Eye to the Sky It’s just a tiny building standing alone at the edge of campus, but inside is a window that opens on the universe. By Christopher Dow
36 Forging New Connexions
By Mitch Kaplan
26 Jimmy Treybig on Success Every time you visit an ATM, you can thank Jimmy Treybig, whose innovative leadership style makes him a standout.
Rice’s Connexions Project is using digital resources to help change the face of academic publishing. By Jade Boyd and Christopher Dow
By Aruni Gunasegaram and Pam Losefsky
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Rice Sallyport Fall 2006, Vol. 63, No. 1
“Cutting Edge.” There is hardly a university brochure or strategic plan written without using this phrase, usually more than once. What exactly does it mean? It captures the notion of activity at the border of knowledge, at the interface between what is known and unknown. It can be applied to almost every endeavor at a university and is sometimes used with an abandon that suggests a kind of promiscuous hype. Cuttingedge research is research that incorporates new techniques or uses known techniques to advance the frontier of knowledge. But we can also speak of cutting-edge (or more often, avant-garde) art or music. So at the risk of simply being one more university president touting the cutting edge nature of the activity on campus, let me highlight just a few things in this issue of Sallyport that I think truly merit that designation. Professor Michael Deem’s research and modeling of the immune system’s response to multiple versions of the dengue virus certainly push the envelope of understanding how the body responds to such threats. More important, it helped Michael formulate a strategy to overcome the body’s response (“polytopic vaccination”), which could lead to the first effective vaccinations against multiple forms of the virus. Even more encouraging, Michael’s research, conducted with one of his graduate students, Hao Zhou, provides a new understanding and a new strategy that could be effective against other deadly viruses as well. Similarly, Professor Denise Chen’s work, co-authored by two undergraduate students, has probed a little understood area, namely the human response to olfactory stimuli. Her work suggests that the smell of fear-induced sweat induces change in behavior, including greater accuracy in certain decisions and at the same time a hesitancy to respond to uncertain situations. A very different example of cutting-edge work is the development of the Connexions project under the leadership of Professor Richard Baraniuk. “ The exploration This project, which is aimed at developing and providing the technology of new things or for shared instructional materials, is truly changing the notion of how inthe discovery of formation for pedagogic purposes is stored, shared, and distributed. The new knowledge or result will be radically less expensive materials, and therefore the opportunew art creates a nity to completely change, for example, the degree to which developing learning experience countries can participate in providing and using such materials. Using some that cannot be of the technology developed by Connexions, Rice is seeking to resurrect replicated in any the Rice University Press as a digital venture, a move that has sparked disother way. That is cussion across the nation. (Richard attracted even more attention recently the unique strength through his work on the “single pixel” camera, a potentially extraordinary of education in a breakthrough that is, of course, “cutting edge.”) research university. ” The final example of such pathbreaking work comes from outside science and technology, demonstrating that the label cutting edge can apply to —David W. Leebron nearly any area of the university’s endeavors. The article on Syzygy portrays the program Professor Art Gottschalk has built to bring the performance of new music to Rice. As he says, “New music is the hardest to play because no one is really familiar with it, so the concert is a great learning experience for our students.” Art’s comment goes to the heart of the matter—whether in science, engineering, the social sciences, humanities, architecture, or music. The exploration of new things or the discovery of new knowledge or new art creates a learning experience that cannot be replicated in any other way. That is the unique strength of education in a research university. It has the capacity to produce graduates who will spend their careers at the cutting edge, advancing knowledge and creativity for the benefit and enjoyment of us all. Or, as we like to say Rice, there shall be “no upper limit” to the work we do here.
Published by the Division of Public Affairs Suzanne Gschwind, director of Web and Print Communications Editor Christopher Dow Editorial Director Tracey Rhoades Creative Director Jeff Cox Art Director Chuck Thurmon Editorial Staff Sarah Williams, assistant editor Christie Wise, production coordinator Design Staff Tommy LaVergne, photographer Jeff Fitlow, assistant photographer The Rice University Board of Trustees James W. Crownover, chair; J.D. Bucky Allshouse; D. Kent Anderson; Teveia Rose Barnes; Alfredo Brener; Vicki Whamond Bretthauer; Robert T. Brockman; Albert Y. Chao; Robert L. Clarke; Edward A. Dominguez; Bruce W. Dunlevie; Lynn Laverty Elsenhans; Douglas Lee Foshee; Susanne Morris Glasscock; Carl E. Isgren; K. Terry Koonce; Michael R. Lynch; Robert R. Maxfield; Steven L. Miller; M. Kenneth Oshman; Marc Shapiro; L. E. Simmons; Robert B. Tudor III Administrative Officers David W. Leebron, president; Kathy Collins, vice president for Finance; Eric J o h n s o n , v i c e p re s i d e n t f o r Resource Development; Kevin Kirby, vice president for Administration; Eugene Levy, provost; Chris Muñoz, vice president for Enrollment; Scott W. Wise, vice president for Investments and treasurer; Richard A. Zansitis, general counsel; TBN, vice president for Public Affairs. All submissions to Sallyport are subject to editing for length, clarity, accuracy, appropriateness, and fairness to third parties. Sallyport is published by the Division of Public Affairs of Rice University and is sent to university alumni, faculty, staff, graduate students, parents of undergraduates, and friends of the university. Editorial Offices Office of Publications–MS 95 P.O. Box 1892 Houston, Texas 77251-1892 Fax: 713-348-6751 Email: sallyport@rice.edu Postmaster Send address changes to: Rice University Development Services–MS 80 P.O. Box 1892 Houston, TX 77251-1892 © Nov embe r 20 06 Rice Unive rsity
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Letters
The Gonzales Case
I was astonished to read Professor Thomas Haskell’s commentary in the summer edition concerning the portrait of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales that appeared last winter. I vividly recall Professor Haskell’s American history class, which I took in 1978. His lectures were inspiring and insightful. The class was simply thrilling. I recall that Professor Haskell, at the beginning of the semester, explained why the study of history is so important. He spoke of the fact that history does not “repeat itself,” but that, sometimes, history can educate us about past trends that will help us understand our future. I was astonished at his article because he evidently has lost faith in his own words. Professor Haskell appears to have become locked in a tedious perception of a conflict that commenced in 1967 and ended in 1973. He essentially argues that the Bush administration, under the direction of Attorney General Gonzales, institutionalized the use of torture and violated the Geneva Conventions. Professor Haskell provides no evidence for these assertions. He does not refute the fact that the events of Abu Gharaib constitute errant behavior by ill-trained troops rather than by an established policy of the administration. He does not even demonstrate that the actions there, while certainly brutal, amount to torture for purposes of any international convention or treaty. He does not because he cannot. The question of how we defined torture was precisely the type of issue that the Bush administration grappled with in this war. So was the question of how we must treat enemy combatants who do not wear uniforms, who hide among civilians, and who murder their fellow Muslims. Professor
letters
Haskell’s comparison of the treatment of a common criminal to that of an alQaeda operative found on the battlefield demonstrates his willful or naïve failure to comprehend how difficult these questions are, insofar as they arise in a new kind of war. In short, Professor Haskell failed to account for a very significant trend, the use of terrorism by Islamists that commenced in earnest in the early 1980s and extends until today. He failed to account for the fact that our nation had not, before 9/11, come to terms with the need to wage this war, nor had it considered how the war should be waged within the context of our Constitution, our laws, and our international obligations. He did not consider what this trend would mean for the administration that found itself in power on September 11, 2001. I am not a historian of Professor Haskell’s academic merit. However, I am quite certain that future historians will remark that this administration, and Attorney General Gonzales, faced a new type of warfare, one that does not neatly fit into ancient normative standards, that they seriously analyzed what was lawful and what was unlawful, that they applied their analysis in good faith, and that they even extended protections beyond the limits of the black letter of law. Some may disagree with their conclusions, but the implication that they acted in bad faith is simply unwarranted. Thomas M. Selman ’80
Silver Springs, Maryland
Please add my voice to those who question whether Alberto Gonzalez merits the title of “Distinguished Alumnus.” I cannot imagine how anyone who has taken their education seriously at Rice could come up with such justifications for torture, along with bypassing the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. I also would suggest that you take at look at the PBS Frontline special, “The Torture Question” (www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/torture/interviews/berg. html), where another Rice alum, Thomas Berg ’75, tells the story from the point of view of an army reservist and judge advocate general who has experienced first-hand the mess at Guantanamo and the havoc the Bush administration has wrought on our military. Deena Berg ’79
Georgetown, Texas
I suppose that it would be possible to refute Thomas Haskell’s letter in the summer Sallyport point by point. That
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would, undoubtedly, be futile: Sallyport would not publish such a refutation, and surely Professor Haskell could not be convinced of his errors. The entire page of vitriol can be summarized: Damn President George W. Bush and the horse he rode in on. It also probably is pointless to remind Professor Haskell and the, probably, many like-minded faculty at Rice that the honor of “Distinguished Alumnus” is granted by the Association of Rice Alumni. If Professor Haskell is an alumnus, I assume he would proudly have added class identification to his name and would have some standing to “disagree” with the choice of the alumni of the university. He does not have such standing in my opinion. Sallyport would have been wise to suggest that Professor Haskell choose another forum for his diatribe. J. Bruce Laubach ’55
Castle Rock, Colorado
I applaud Thomas Haskell’s recent essay on the Alberto Gonzales profile. It roused me from the torpor induced by the successive illnesses that plagued, and continue to plague me, since I retired from Rice’s faculty—a torpor that Bush II’s domestic and foreign policies have festered into weltschmerz. His essay’s conclusions are valid. Rice erred grievously by honoring Gonzales, from whose Rice and Harvard Law School classes, apparently, he retained nothing about American history and constitutionalism that deserved— no, required—his respect. His approval of torture as a technique for eliciting information from helpless prisoners shames him, Rice, and America. The reviewer of Bill Minutaglio’s The President’s Counselor: The Rise to Power of Alberto Gonzales (2006), concluded that “this sorry tale . . . goes a long way toward removing the veil Gonzales has tried to drape over his career” (New York Times Review of Books, August 27, 2006, page 14). A sorry tale indeed. Further lifting the veil, I note that, for many years, my research interests involved me with many members of the Texas legal community. An impressive and depressing number of the lawyers and judges who knew Gonzales during the pre-Washington, D.C., phases of his career expressed low opinions of him as a person and a professional. As U.S. attorney general, Gonzales still performs on a low, bush-league, sycophant level. To be sure, every lawyer owes his/ her client all plausible, relevant, and reasonable advice, but not necessarily
that lawyer’s complicitous assent. But Attorney General Gonzales has decided that his sole client is this president, not the United States, its Constitution with its Bill of Rights, or the laws and treaties made under that authority. Plausibility, relevance, and reason, like history itself, have low priorities, or none. Professor Haskell and I served in different wars but in more-or-less allied armed services: he in the navy, and I in the marines. We share also training and experience as historians. And we both deplore Rice’s mistake in honoring this unworthy alumnus. Well, I’m in good company. Harold M. Hyman
William P. Hobby Professor Emeritus of History Rice University Baseball Accolades
I am one of the coaches of an 11-andunder competitive baseball team from Ankeny, Iowa. We were participating in a youth tournament that ran parallel with the College World Series in Omaha, Nebraska, and had the pleasure to stay at the Doubletree Inn and Suites with Rice’s baseball team. In these days of people trying to find fault with our collegiate athletes, I felt the need to let you know how much our parents and kids appreciated the class and kindness of your coaches and players and the players’ parents. Even though our team sports the insignia and colors of one of your major rivals, the players were very gracious toward our kids and parents. They were willing to talk to our kids about baseball and sign hats and other memorabilia. All of our kids purchased Rice hats at the hotel for the players to sign and still wear them very proudly. It was extremely refreshing to see the good side of what collegiate sports are about, and you should be very proud of your team members, not only for their talents but also for the way they handle themselves in public. There are 12 kids from Iowa who will remember this forever and always will be fans of the Rice team. These same kids rooted for the Owls during the College World Series and shared your disappointment when they lost. Tim Severson
Coach for the Ankeny Longhorns Ankeny, Iowa
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We’ll Always Have Paris
Paris is known for romantic settings, gourmet dining, and haute couture, but it’s the rich architectural tapestry that makes the City of Lights a perfect place for Rice School of Architecture Paris. “Paris is such a rich urban lab,” says John Casbarian, professor and associate dean of Rice’s School of Architecture and one of the founders of the Paris program. “Its infrastructure has vestiges of architecture from the Roman encampment all the way to buildings of the 21st century. Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, modern: it’s all there.” Study abroad has long been a valued component of architectural study, but for years, Rice students who chose that option did so independently and without credit. Increasingly, professors at the architecture school saw how such a program improved student experiences, and for almost three years, the school operated a joint program in Lugano, Switzerland, with the Southern California Institute of Architecture. “The location was beautiful, but it was isolated and had no urban life,” Casbarian recalls. “When the program began to change, we decided to wipe the slate clean and start our own program. We settled on Paris as the ideal location.” The Rice School of Architecture Paris (RSAP) was approved in spring 2002, and not missing a beat, Casbarian began looking for a location for the school and apartments for students. Kent Fitzsimons ’00, a Rice alum from Canada whose wife is French, joined the team as resident assistant
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director, and the program officially opened that fall. Each semester, 10 final-year bachelor’s or third-year master’s degree candidates attend RSAP, which is located close to the Bastille and Gare de Lyon. Classes in the semester-long program include design studio, urban and architectural history and theory, documentary representation, and French language studies. Fitzsimons and Casbarian, who travels to Paris monthly, teach studio classes, and
design in the Paris region as well as works of modern architecture normally closed to the public or off the beaten path. Each semester also features a five-day trip to cities like Berlin, Rotterdam, or Basel, as well as weekend trips within France. “We combine stays in great European cities with visits to significant architectural works,” Fitzsimons explains. “We always spend a day at the Priory of La Tourette near Lyon, a celebrated late work of the Swiss architect Le Corbusier, built as a Dominican university in the late 1950s.” Rounding out the experience are real-world projects with constituent groups, such as developers, city
“Students who complete the program and return to Rice bring back greater insight, a broadened urban perspective, and international experience, that not only enrich their work but also are shared with their peers.”
Rice faculty and local educators and practitioners contribute as well. History and theory courses consist of lectures by specialists on particular topics, such as postwar city buildings in France or the relationship between building technologies and cultural changes in early architectural modernism. “Paris attracts architects and scholars from all over, so the faculty is international,” Fitzsimons says. “We have critics and lecturers from England, Belgium, Switzerland, New Zealand, and, of course, the many regions of France.” In addition to attending classes, students visit examples of urban
— John Casbarian
officials, and private clients. The eclectic faculty and travel opportunities appeal to students. “My favorite part of the program was the video/photography class taught by Luciano Rigolini, who is a great character,” says Eric Ratkowski, who attended RSAP in spring 2005 and presented his master’s thesis last January. “A close second was the urban studies class, which took us to the suburbs and far off the tourist trail.” Program organizers are careful not to schedule too much, providing opportunities for students to learn from the culture and follow personal interests. Many students take ad-
vantage of Paris’s music scene, film culture, and public swimming facilities, Fitzsimons notes. Other activities help immerse students in the culture. “Every few weeks, we have lunch clubs,” Fitzsimons says. “We eat as a group at typical bistros that serve affordable traditional food. This is an opportunity to introduce students to French culture through food and conversations.” Students also find independent opportunities to learn about French culture. “I really enjoyed taking the train as a regular part of my routine,” Ratkowski says. “It was a novelty that might have gotten old had I stayed longer, but it was a great contrast to my previous residences in Detroit and Houston.” Judging from the number of applicants—usually around 30 each semester—the program is a huge success. “We’ve had incredibly positive feedback,” Casbarian says. “The response from the students and their enthusiasm are testaments to the continued, ongoing interest in the program.” Exposure to urban issues and different cultural experiences, he says, is important to the study of architecture. “The value is immeasurable,” Casbarian affirms. “Students who complete the program and return to Rice bring back greater insight, a broadened urban perspective, and international experience, that not only enrich their work but also are shared with their peers.” —Dawn Dorsey
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Get the Facts
Building Better Buildings
Want to know the latest statistical information on Rice? The Office of Institutional Research has a new website that is a treasure trove of information about the university and its mission, history, academics, and direction for the future; demographics on faculty, students, and alums; information on research and gift revenues; and much more. www.rice.edu/OIR
Design, bid, and build: While this is the traditional way to construct a building, does it still work?
says. “We must find better methods for these teams to apportion risks and rewards.” In recent focus group meetings at the university, the Rice Building Institute surveyed It’s an important question. Close to $700 bil102 building industry leaders representing evlion, or about 8 percent, of the U.S. annual ery major discipline, including finance, design, gross domestic product, is spent on construcengineering, construction, and management. tion. The building industry has become so According to Powell, the feedback from ownlarge and projects have become so complex ers and users was that today’s rapidly evolving in recent years that building owners and users business climate poses serious challenges to alike complain that no one is happy by the time those involved in new building construction. a job is done. What’s needed, according to Joe By the time a new building is programmed, Powell, the executive director of designed, constructed, and octhe Rice Building Institute, is a new cupied, its original purposes may type of management that fosters an “Engineering, design, have changed. integrated team approach. “When we interviewed the and construction pro- major “Creating the built environment owners of various construcin the United States involves 1.2 tion projects,” Powell says, “they cesses have become million companies,” Powell comclaimed the problem isn’t the ments. “The industry is large, fragmore sophisticated, competence of the professionmented, and burdened by a wide involved in a building project. but the management als collection of outmoded traditions, They believe the problem is poor and none of the major players are of these processes management and communication. happy.” Engineering, design, and conhasn’t kept pace.” Most of the problems, according struction processes have become to Powell, start with the process it—Joe Powell more sophisticated, but the manself. Traditional sequential product agement of these processes hasn’t delivery systems—which often cost kept pace.” too much, take too much time, and One of the barriers to improved communicabecome too confusing—need to be replaced tion between the professions is their increasing with an integrated team approach that allows specialization. Powell hopes that eventually the all the project’s experts to get involved earlier professional schools will incorporate the noin the process. tion of interdisciplinary collaboration into their Bringing together different building excurricula. perts—from the architects, engineers, and Currently, Powell and members of the incontractors to the real estate advisors and attorstitute are overseeing the development of alneys—requires new management approaches, ternative project delivery strategies for new revised legal relationships among the various healthcare facilities. Working with a broad, inprofessional groups, and new insurance and terdisciplinary group of industry and academic bonding requirements, Powell notes. An inleaders, they will define and analyze the advantegrated construction team also would need tages and disadvantages of current systems used to overcome adversarial relationships that trato construct the 10 largest medical centers in ditionally have existed among the different the United States. Their goal is to recommend a professional groups, making it difficult for the new set of approaches and create a management groups to share their expertise effectively. “New decision matrix that will represent the most efmanagement structures need to be developed fective delivery systems for different types of so the performance of one set of experts is not healthcare buildings. sacrificed for the motives of another,” Powell —Jennifer Evans
Rice on List of “New Ivies” Rice University has been named to the elite “New Ivies” list in the 2007 Kaplan/Newsweek How to Get into College guide. “The nation’s elite colleges these days include more than Harvard, Yale, and Princeton,” reports Newsweek, citing the tough competition for top students. “The demand for an excellent education has created an ever-expanding supply of big and small campuses that provide great academics and first-rate faculties.” The “New Ivies” list was created to recognize the growing reputation and heightened selectiveness that Rice and other academically outstanding schools have achieved. The guide spotlights 25 colleges and universities whose exemplary academic programs and increasing number of top students have edged them to a competitive status rivaling the Ivy League. Selection was based on admissions statistics as well as interviews with administrators, students, faculty, and alumni. The guide’s write-up about Rice describes the campus as “pastoral,” emphasizes the student–faculty interaction, and notes that the Oxford-inspired nine residential colleges provide an opportunity for students to belong to a more intimate group. Listed as Rice’s rivals for applicants are Stanford, Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Duke.
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Does Education Help Breed Segregation? Most of us think that education broadens an individual’s perspective and helps diminish racist attitudes. Prior studies have validated that conventional wisdom, but new research indicates just the opposite may be true.
A study, co-authored by Rice sociologist Michael Emerson, shows that increased education of whites, in particular, may not only have little effect on eliminating prejudice, but it also may be one reason behind the rise of racial segregation in U.S. schools. Furthermore, higher-educated whites, regardless of their income, are more likely than less-educated whites to judge a school’s quality and base their school choice on its racial composition. Black–white racial segregation has been on the rise in primary and secondary schools over the past decade. While whites, especially those who are highly educated, may express an interest in having their children attend integrated schools, in reality, they seek out schools that are racially segregated. In the study, researchers found, on average, that the greater the education of white parents, the more likely they will remove their children from public schools as the percentage of black students increases. “We believed from prior studies that education has a significantly positive impact on racial attitudes,” says Emerson, the Allyn and Gladys Cline Professor of Sociology. “We found when studying behaviors, however, that acquiring more education is not a means of combating segregation. Education may broaden an individual’s world, but it also leads to greater negative sensitivity toward blacks’ presence in public schools.” Emerson and research colleague David Sikkink, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame, know that income and other factors come into play in terms of school choice, but their study shows that, even after controlling for these variables, education has an unintended effect. Whites with more education place a greater emphasis on race when choosing a school for their children, while higher-educated African Americans do not consider race.
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“I do believe that white people are being sincere when they claim that racial inequality is not a good thing and that they’d like to see it eliminated,” says Emerson. “However, they are caught in a social system in which their liberal attitudes about race aren’t reflected in their behavior.” According to the researchers, part of this behavior is explained by the place and meaning of schooling for children of moreeducated white parents. Degrees, for example, become status markers, regardless of income. Parents seek quality education for their children to ensure they are not hindered from achieving the “good life.” As earlier studies indicate, education is a key to social mobility and one of the most important forms of cultural capital. Emerson and Sikkink cite earlier work on school choice in Philadelphia, where race was found to be a factor in whites’ evaluations of the quality of a school. Unlike blacks, who judged schools on the basis of such outcomes as their graduation rates and students’ test scores, whites initially eliminated any schools with a majority of black students before considering factors such as schools’ graduation rates. When they analyzed a national data set of whites and nonHispanic blacks to see if the level of their education would have an impact on their school choice, Emerson and Sikkink found a similar pattern. “Whites with higher levels of education still made school choices based on race,” explains Emerson, “while blacks did not.” The researchers found that regardless of income, more-educated whites in their data set also lived in “whiter” neighborhoods than less-educated whites. Higher-income African Americans also lived in whiter, but more racially mixed, neighborhoods than lower-income blacks. “The more income African Americans made,” Emerson says, “the more likely their children attended more racially mixed schools than did Af-
rican American children of less-educated, lower-income parents.” This, he explains, is because more highly educated or higherincome African Americans often live in areas with racially mixed local public schools, close to high concentrations of whites that have undergone desegregation plans, while African American children of less-educated, lower-income parents attend largely black schools. When separating income from their analysis, however, the researchers concluded that unlike whites, African American parents’ higher-education levels don’t affect their school choice. In addition to the findings regarding the impact of parents’ education level and income on school choice, the study found that parents who are older and attend church more frequently look upon school choice more favorably. Those living in the West more than any other region of the country are less likely to take advantage of school choice programs, while urban residents are more likely to use such programs. Not surprisingly, residents living in areas with higher levels of home ownership, which probably reflects school quality, were found to be less likely to remove their children from the local public school. “Our study arrived at a very sad and profound conclusion,” says Emerson. “More formal education is not the answer to racial segregation in this country. Without a structure of laws requiring desegregation, it appears that segregation will continue to breed segregation.” Titled “School Choice and Racial Residential Segregation in U.S. Schools: The Role of Parents’ Education,” the study will be published in an upcoming issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies. —Pam Sheridan
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Vaccination Technique Might Combat Fearsome Diseases in Brazil, Cuba, Thailand, and other tropical and subtropical countries. Because sequential infection by multiple dengue viruses can lead to increased likelihood of deadly infections, public health officials have attempted to counter the threat of coexistent versions of dengue by developing a vaccine against all four versions simultaneously. Doctors found that Known as “bone-break disease,” dengue is characterized by patients who were given a four-component vaccine were excruciating pain and was “the most important mosquitobeing protected against only one or two versions of the born viral disease affecting humans” in 2005, according to disease, due to immunodominance. the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Intrigued by these results, Deem and graduate student Hao Dengue infection is caused by one of four closely related Zhou developed a precise computer model of the immune viruses. Previous exposure to one of the four by prior infection system’s biochemical scanning process to see if they could makes people significantly more likely to develop a potentially recreate the effect and find out what caused it. Their program lethal hemorrhagic condition if they are later infected by one conducts statistical calculations about the likelihood of specific of the other three viruses. And, unfortunately, attempts to interactions at the atomic level. They conducted trillions of vaccinate against the four known dengue viruses calculations and gradually built up a bigger picture have been failures precisely because vaccination of what occurs in dengue immunodominance. also counts as a previous exposure. “When faced with more than one version of “This is a classic case of something called ‘original the virus,” Deem says, “the immune system may antigenic sin,’ which happens when our immune respond preferentially against the version for which system becomes overly reliant on memory when it has T-cells with the strongest affinity, which is recognizing diseases similar to those that it has immunodominance.” seen before,” explains Michael Deem, the John He says that polytopic vaccination—giving different W. Cox Professor in Biochemical and Genetic vaccines simultaneously at different locations on Engineering and professor of physics and astronomy. the body—could help overcome immunodominance “With diseases like HIV, influenza, and dengue, our by taking advantage of the relative isolation of Michael Deem acquired immune system’s tendency to go with lymph nodes throughout the body. Deem believes what it knows can leave us more vulnerable to infection from vaccinations at four different sites, served by four different a mutant strain or a related virus. The immune system may lymph nodes, could allow the body to simultaneously develop respond less favorably in these cases than if it had never immune responses against all four versions of dengue. been exposed to the disease in the first place.” “The literature about immunodominance is new and Original antigenic sin, or immunodominance, arises out of growing,” Deem says. “Ours is the first model that can predict the procedure the immune system uses to target infection. immunodominance, and when we compare our results with The immune system identifies infected cells and brings pieces experimental data from dengue vaccination trials, they match of them into the lymph node for targeting. Within a few quite closely. There may be other factors at work, but we days of infection, the immune system completes a massive appear to be explaining a significant portion of the effect that scan of the 100 million cells—called “T-cells”—available to occurs in dengue immunodominance.” orchestrate an immune system response. Through a complex Immunodominance also is a problem for researchers working trial-and-error process, it identifies three to five T-cells that on vaccines for both the AIDS virus and cancer, each of which best recognize and attack the components of the sickened mutate quickly and occur in multiple strains. Deem’s study, cells. Once the cells are selected, they are produced by the however, suggests that the multisite vaccination strategy millions and sent out to clear the infection. After the infection may be effective against these other diseases as well. is gone, thousands of these preprogrammed T-cells remain The research is supported by the National Institutes of Health in the body, lying in wait should the disease return. and the National Science Foundation and was published in In recent years, public health officials have documented the March 24 issue of the journal Vaccine. the disturbing co-existence of two or more dengue viruses —Jade Boyd Dengue fever may be less well known than malaria, but it’s a lot more dangerous. A mosquito-born disease, dengue kills tens of thousands of people per year and sickens 100 million more.
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Depiction of Disease in Film Promotes Negative Images Ever since the age of globalization began following World War II, film media have regularly depicted invisible diseases. According to the first historical analysis of these films, whose relevance is underscored by the threat of recent contagions like SARS and bird flu, the techniques used to represent unseen threats also contain embedded views of racial impurity and sexual deviance, inadvertently promoting negative images of racism and sexuality. In her book Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health, Rice English professor Kirsten Ostherr details depictions of the spread of disease in various types of film media and argues that the problem boils down to a simplified division of the world. “Historically, these films convey a sense that there’s a developed world and a developing world,” explains Ostherr, “where the developed world is full of healthy white people and the developing world is full of nonwhite, diseased people spreading contagions.” First sparked by an interest in how AIDS was covered in the late-1990s, Ostherr analyzed a variety of sources, including public health films from the 1940s, alien invasion films of the 1950s, and the 1995 Hollywood movie Outbreak, among
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others. To depict contagion, films have turned to the same production tools time and time again: documentary coverage, animation or graphics, and voice-over. Independently, they don’t convey the presence of a pathogen, but together, they create a highly charged mixture of images and words. The filmmakers, Ostherr says, do not necessarily raise issues of race and sexuality intentionally. However, the impact of even unintentional negative associations can jump from the screen to the real world. “One of the great consequences of the idea of an underdeveloped world as source of disease is to isolate the source or imply the ‘primitivism’ of the origins of the disease,” Ostherr says. “If a film represents a place as incapable of profiting from advances in healthcare or medicine, it’s hard to convince a country of voters that such a place deserves funding for healthcare research and support.” A recent television news report on bird flu, for example, started with a news anchor providing some background. It then cut to documentary footage of Chinese people in close proximity to dead chickens,
Kirsten Ostherr
with a voice-over from the anchor, followed by an animated graph. A public health film from the mid-20th century used similar devices. Documentary footage of an African village connected to a pathogen included a voice-over, then moved to an animated image of a globe, with arrows showing the path of the disease starting from Africa and spreading around the world. Both of these portrayals are problematic, Ostherr says. “In both,” she notes, “you get the idea that African bodies or Chinese bodies are inherently diseased.” Films also can convey a “pathological other” who might initially look like the audience but who, due to some deviant behavior, is different and thus diseased. The alien invasion films of the 1950s often fol-
lowed such a format, depicting aliens taking on the form of human beings. Homosexuality as sexual deviance also can be depicted this way, as seen in an educational film for military recruits from 1945. Using footage of two men, one of whom is infected with a disease, working in close proximity to each other—perhaps inappropriately close—the film cuts to an animated arrow showing that such close contact has spread the pathogen from the first man’s bunk to the second’s, and then to the entire bunkhouse and beyond. In an era when outbreaks such as SARS, bird flu, and foot-and-mouth disease continue to threaten the global community, Ostherr knows her research won’t help prevent such pathogens, but she hopes it will make producers and audiences more aware of the implications of such depictions. “If we can think critically of the images that are used,” she says, “and if producers can understand the subtle implications of the images they use, some of these broader but more insidious problems may be diminished over time.” —Jennifer Evans
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Fear-Produced Warning Signals Improve Cognitive Performance Fear: It’s sure to make you think. That’s the news from a Rice study into the cognitive performance and the chemical warning signals produced by fear. Women who were exposed to chemicals from fear-induced sweat performed more accurately on word-association tasks than did women exposed to chemicals from other types of sweat or no sweat at all. “It is well documented in research literature that animals experiencing stress and fear produce chemical warning signals that can lead to behavioral, endocrinological, and immunological changes in their fellow animals of the same species,” says Denise Chen, assistant professor of psychology at Rice and principal investigator in the study. “We wanted to see if this applies to humans as well.” For the study, Chen collected samples of sweat from research volunteers who kept gauze pads in their armpits while they watched videos of horror movies and nonthreatening documentaries. The sweat samples were then stored in a freezer until needed for the study. Next, Chen had 75 female students between the ages of 18 and 22 respond to word-association tests. Some of the words were associated with threatening or fear-related topics, like weapons. During the tests, each participant had a piece of gauze attached above her lips so that she was exposed to either chemicals from sweat or none at all. The research participants were not aware of the nature of the smells, and the smells did not differ on the intensity or pleasantness ratings. Chen then compared how the chemicals from the sweat impacted the speed
and accuracy of participants’ results on the word-association tests. When processing meaningfully related word pairs, the participants exposed to the fear chemicals were 85 percent accurate, while those in either the neutral sweat or the control (nosweat) condition were 80 percent accurate. “This is a statistically significant difference,” Chen notes. Interestingly, when processing word pairs that were ambiguous in threat content, such as one neutral word paired with a threatening word or a pair of neutral words, subjects in the fear condition were 15 to 16 percent slower in responding than those in the neutral sweat condition. Chen’s theory is that the chemicals from fear-induced sweat prompted subjects to be more cautious. “We demonstrated that, in humans, chemical signals from fear facilitated overall accuracy in identifying word relatedness independent of the perceived qualities of the smells,” Chen says. “The effect may arise from a learned association, including greater cautiousness and changes in cognitive strategies.” “Human olfaction is a young, vibrant field,” Chen says, noting that the behavioral study of this subject is still in the early stage. “Olfactory receptors were discovered in the early 1990s. We now know that olfaction involves hundreds of receptors.” The study, coauthored by Ameeta Katdare ’04 and Nadia Lucas ’05, a Rice Century Scholar, was published in the journal Chemical Senses. The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health. —B. J. Almond
“Olfactory receptors were discovered in the early 1990s. We now know that olfaction involves hundreds of receptors.”
—Denise Chen
Ultrasmall a Big Deal
Ian Hamilton ’09
When Ian Hamilton ’09 was attending high school in Centennial, Colorado, he developed an interest in nanotechnology—science and engineering fields that revolve around the design and control of systems on the ultrasmall scale. This fascination led him to an important discovery: Rice University. Hamilton, a sophomore chemical engineering major and resident of Martel College, wanted an opportunity to merge the fields of bioengineering, chemical engineering, physics, chemistry, and mechanical engineering to build machines on a molecular scale. “When I read about these things online,” he recalls, “the sites commonly mentioned Rice.” After he was awarded the Loewenstern Scholarship in Engineering and the Max F. Roy Scholarship, Hamilton chose Rice over a handful of other elite institutions. “Caltech accepted me, and until my folder from Rice came with a simple sheet of paper proclaiming my freedom from tuition, I was almost certain to go there instead,” he says. “But the scholarship clinched it. It made me feel like Rice wasn’t just accepting me but that it really wanted me. To have a school as good as Rice offering that kind of support was a big deal.”
Rice University • Office of Development—MS 81 P.O. Box 1892 • Houston, TX 77251-1892 713-348-4600 • www.giving.rice.edu
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Rice Receives $2.5M To Fund Collaborative Projects The John and Ann Doerr Fund for Computational Biomedicine, established by John Doerr ’73, one of the venture capitalists behind Google, and his wife, Ann Doerr ’75, will provide a $2.5 million grant to Rice under the Collaborative Advances in Biomedical Computing (CABC) program of the Gulf Coast Center for Computational Cancer Research (GC4R). The seed money will be used to support collaborative projects that apply computational science to biomedical research. “This fund will help overcome a fundamental impediment to initiating research projects that combine computer science with biomedical sciences: the difficulty of establishing the track record of success needed to attract funding from major agencies such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health,” says Ken Kennedy, University Professor, the Ann and John Doerr Professor in Computational Engineering in Computer Science, and professor in electrical and computer engineering. “The CABC seed grants will give collaborators on both sides of Main Street enough resources to get started on high-impact joint efforts that will bear fruit over the next decade.” Rice and the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center formed GC4R, which is co-directed by Kennedy and M.D. Anderson’s Donald Berry, to foster joint research projects between computational scientists at Rice and cancer researchers in the Texas Medical Center. GC4R is part of the Gulf Coast Consortia, a collaborative alliance for interdisciplinary bioscience training and research composed of Rice, M.D. Anderson, Baylor College of Medicine, the University of Houston, the University of Texas Medical Branch–Galveston, and the University of Texas Health Science Center–Houston. The first three CABC seed grants were awarded this past spring. The research includes investigations into more-effective and less-toxic cancer drugs, the development of new software and diagnostic techniques for four-dimensional CT scans, and the creation of new models of the complex protein regulatory networks of cancer cells. For more information about CABC, visit gc4r.rice.edu. —Michele Arnold
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From left, Bryan and June Zwan; Edward P. Djerejian, director of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy; and Carol Quillen, director of the Boniuk Center.
Alums Give $2.5M for Diplomacy Program “Peace on Earth” is something printed on holiday cards. For most people it’s a wish, a hope, or a prayer. For June and Bryan Zwan ’74, it’s their objective in life. “We will do whatever we can, in our lifetime, to bring peace to this Earth,” says Bryan Zwan. “We’ve created the June B. and Bryan J. Zwan Visiting Distinguished Scholar Endowment to accomplish this most urgent goal.” The new $2.5 million program is a part of the Boniuk Center for the Study and Advancement of Religious Tolerance and the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. Each year, a prominent scholar, policymaker, journalist, diplomat, or religious figure whose work promotes religious freedom, mutual understanding, and peaceful coexistence across religious boundaries will be in residence at Rice for a threeto 12-month term. The scholar’s time will be divided among hosting research workshops, delivering public lectures, and serving as a guest instructor for undergraduates and as a mentor to graduate students. At the end of each period of residence, the scholar will have produced a significant piece of publishable work that speaks to a real-world problem. All work generated is expected to be archived on the Boniuk Center’s website. The Zwans say they want to bring to the public an increased understanding of the world’s religions with the hope that such understanding will foster a greater capacity for compassion in individuals, communities, and nations. Both the Bo-
niuk Center and the Baker Institute will promulgate the visiting scholars’ research to a broad, international audience with the objective of encouraging action and providing policymakers, decisionmakers, and community leaders with viable solutions for the resolution of ongoing religious tensions and conflicts.
Each year, a prominent scholar, policymaker, journalist, diplomat, or religious figure whose work promotes religious freedom, mutual understanding, and peaceful coexistence across religious boundaries will be in residence at Rice for a three- to 12-month term. The Zwans also are interested in having Rice students observe how their studies here can be applied to the practical affairs of everyday life to increase the quality of life and to bring about a better world. “I am hopeful that when Rice students are fully informed of the issues and learn how, through public debate, viable, nonviolent solutions can be formulated, they will use that knowledge to quench the violence that is destroying nations right before our eyes,” June Zwan says. —Michele Arnold
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Bioengineering Program Ranked Among Top 10 In U.S. News & World Report’s 2007 ranking of America’s best biomedical/bioengineering programs, Rice tied in 10th place with the University of Michigan. “This is a significant achievement considering that we are only 10 years old,” says Veronique Tran, executive director of advancement for the Department of Bioengineering. “Our goal is to improve the rankings each year and eventually to move into the top five.”
Cancer Surgery, Especially by Experienced Surgeons, Saving More Lives Reports from several governmental and nongovernmental organizations show that overall cancer death rates have declined. While there are several factors that can account for this trend—increased diagnosis of cancer at earlier stages, for example—a new medical research study shows that cancer surgery also has become safer over time. Furthermore, there is a significant association between the number of operations performed by hospitals and by doctors and the decreased numbers of cancer deaths. “Operative mortality rates for six specific cancers declined between the time periods 1988 to 1991 and 1997 to 2000 in the three states we studied,” says Vivian Ho, an associate professor of economics at Rice and a fellow in health economics at Rice’s James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. “In the same time periods, the number of hospital and doctor operations for those cancers increased, and the association between more operations and lower cancer death rates in hospitals was quite significant.” The statistics reflect the total volume of surgeries performed at a particular hospital or the total number of operations performed by a particular doctor regardless of hospital location. While prior research found that
hospitals and surgeons performing more operations tended to have fewer cancer patient deaths, no study has examined the association between provider volume and trends in cancer surgery mortality over time. In an article titled “Trends in Hospital and Surgeon Volume and Operative Mortality for Cancer Surgery” in the Annals of Sur-
deaths from operations for colorectal cancer, specifically colon cancer and cancer of the rectum; pulmonary lobectomies; pneumonectomies; esophagectomies; and pancreaticoduodenectomies, or the Whipple procedure, over a 13year period. The smallest decline in patient mortality occurred in pulmonary lobectomy patients, specifically a decline of .8 percent from 4.1 percent between 1988 and 1991 to 3.3 percent from 1997 to 2000. Esopha-
“Operative mortality rates for six specific cancers declined between the time periods 1988 to 1991 and 1997 to 2000 in the three states we studied.”
—Vivian Ho
gical Oncology, Ho and co-authors Martin J. Heslin, Huifeng Yun, and Lee Howard from the University of Alabama report on the first comprehensive study to analyze data on six different types of cancer operations with an extensive sample of surgeons and hospitals in Florida, New Jersey, and New York. The researchers measured population-based trends in
gectomy patients, whose rate of death declined from 14.5 percent to 10.5 percent over the sample period, experienced the largest decrease. Between the time periods 1988 to 1991 and 1997 to 2000, the volume of hospital and doctor operations increased for five of the six types of cancers, with the mean percentage increase equal to 24.3 percent
for hospitals and 24.2 percent for surgeons. Further statistical analyses suggest that these increases in provider volume can explain the entire decline in operative mortality for pulmonary lobectomy and a substantial part of the mortality decline in four of the six other surgeries. In light of their findings, Ho and her research colleagues urge the expansion of centralization efforts such as the Leapfrog Group, a coalition of large employers and other healthcare purchasers that encourages patients and employees to seek out high-volume providers. They also believe that enforcement by states of Certificate of Need regulations, such as those for open-heart surgery and transplantation, might encourage even lower cancer mortality rates by limiting the number of hospitals that perform only a few cancer operations. First introduced by the federal government in the 1970s and still in force in some states today, Certificate of Need regulations permit hospitals and other healthcare providers to build costly new facilities or offer certain new or expanded services only if they can demonstrate a proven need for them. The program is designed to prevent unnecessary duplication of services by selecting the best proposal among competing applicants who wish to provide a particular healthcare service. —B. J. Almond
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Advertisements and a Country in Transition In addition to selling products and services, advertising also can tell a lot about the cultural milieu that produces it. Take the case of China. Where billboards and subway posters once concentrated on public service announcements warning against spitting or littering, they now feature movie stars selling lipstick, three-person families living in luxury condominiums, and sports cars parked on beaches. The variation and changing themes in advertising messages indicate to researchers such as Rice University’s Steven Lewis that China’s major cities recognize they must compete not only with small villages in the countryside but also with other Chinese cities and, indeed, cities around the world. “China’s newest subway systems and the new cities in the interior of China aren’t being built around manufacturing, nor are their transportation systems directed or funded by central governments as was the case in the United States, Europe, and Moscow,” says Lewis, a professor of the practice in humanities, director of the Asian Studies Program at Rice, and head of the Transnational China Project at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. “The development of these cities and the subways that serve their new residents are going to require coalitions of real-estate developers, companies, and local governments.” According to Lewis, advertising in
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many of China’s cities, both above ground and in subways, reflects the country’s shift from a planned economy to a market economy with an increasing focus on local economic development. “These city governments must struggle to find the fiscal resources to pay for the social costs of closing state-owned enterprises and downsizing government agencies,” Lewis explains. How China’s local governments are responding to the country’s decentralization, liberalization, and integration into the global market is reflected in the messages and images of its public service ads and the subways in which they are displayed. Lewis should know. Since 1998, he and nearly a score of Rice University and foreign scholars and students have collected and archived more than 4,000 images of the public service and commercial advertising in the subway lines of Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Kaohsiung, Singapore, and Taipei. From the first ads he recorded, which often warned people about things they should not do, such as spit, jaywalk, or litter, Lewis has seen a tremendous difference, particularly in the way they reflect local development needs. “To make the transition from a postsocialist city to a global city, they must attract new capital, people, and technologies,”
hiring, and increased awareness of Lewis says. “This includes changing violence against women. the historical image of the city that “It appears that the national govalready exists in the minds of domestic ernment sets a broad agenda, but the and foreign investors.” local governments incorporate what As an example, Lewis described they wish to promote locally into Beijing’s desire to replace its porthe ads,” Lewis says. “For example, trayal as the home of an enormous in one Beijing district where most bureaucracy and headquarters of of the high-tech industry is based, the military to a site for information the local government produced ads technology laboratories. Murals warning against piracy and other depicting national historical figures technology-related violations.” have become crowded with electric Lewis also observed that, while billboards displaying multimedia commercial ads appeal to consumcampaigns that ask residents to be ers to think of themselves as part socially responsible. Since privaof a transnational Chinese middle tization in the 1990s, the subway class, there are still no public serstation in Beijing, as in several vice announcements— other Chinese cities, has other than in Hong become a small-scale Kong—asking comshopping mall, and ads muters to help solve promoting local economic transnational or global development have begun social and economic to appear. problems. And thus In his book chapter far, the public service in Globalization and the announcements in Chinese City, edited by Chinese subways do Fulong Wu, Lewis denot encourage their scribes changes in the Steven Lewis passengers to think advertising landscape of of themselves as competitors with Shanghai’s subway system as well other cities in a global economy. as ads in Singapore promoting family Still, as technology develops and planning, education, racial tolerance, advertising companies become public service, and civic morality. In privatized international enterprises, Taipei’s stations, as in many of the Lewis predicts that advertising in other cities’ subways, few public subways, train stations, and airports service advertisements appeared in China and around the world could until the late 1990s. National and have an impact on how people see local government ad campaigns themselves vis-à-vis the rest of the have since promoted literacy and world. encouraged national military service, —B. J. Almond AIDS prevention, equal-opportunity
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NIH Award Benefits Graduate Study in IBB T-Ray S ur p r i s e :
Rice Lab Makes Unexpected Discovery Frequently, the unexpected results in science are the most exciting. That’s the case with the latest findings from the lab of Rice electrical engineer Daniel Mittleman, who was trying to find new ways to use terahertz energy, or T-rays, for chemical sensing when he noticed a strange tendency of the signals to travel more slowly if they were sent down smaller wires. The odd phenomenon arises from the unique way T-rays interact with the sea of electrons flowing across the surface of a wire, says Mittleman, associate professor in electrical and computer engineering. “A similar variation in wave velocity is well-documented for higher frequency radiation in the visible portion of the spectrum, but this was a real puzzle because no one had predicted it for such low frequencies.” Mittleman and graduate student Kanglin Wang discovered the phenomenon during follow-up experiments to last year’s groundbreaking development of the first T-ray wire waveguides. Their discovery that T-rays propagate along bare wires has allowed them to make T-ray endoscopes that can carry T-rays around corners and into tight places—like pipes and metal containers—where it isn’t feasible to place a T-ray generator. Mittleman hopes to use the technique to design a new class of chemical sensors that port security officers can use to quickly determine whether ex-
plosives are hidden inside shipping containers. That kind of sensing is possible because of the unique properties of T-rays, which fall between microwaves and infrared light in the least-explored region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Metals and other electrical conductors are opaque to T-rays, but like X-rays, T-rays can penetrate plastic, vinyl, paper, dry timber, and glass. Unlike X-rays, however, T-rays pose no health hazards. The reason bare wires can be used as T-ray waveguides is due to the way light from the terahertz frequency interacts with the sea of electrons flowing over the surface of the wire. When a wave of light strikes the wire, it creates a corresponding wave, called a plasmon, in the electrons flowing over the wire’s surface. A new field of optics dedicated to the study of plasmons has sprung up within the past decade, and Rice boasts several leading plasmonics labs, most of which are dedicated to the design, testing, and use of
metallic nanoparticles that are tailored to interact in particular ways with specific wavelengths of light. Plasmonics is the key to understanding the movement of T-rays down wires, Mittleman says. When T-rays strike the wire, they create plasmons, and it is via these electron waves that the T-ray energy propagates down the wire. As the diameter of the wire gets smaller, the curvature becomes more pronounced, and this changes the plasmonic properties of the wire. It is this reduction in curvature, coupled with properties of the metal, that slows the movement. “This is but one example of the interesting new physics coming out of T-ray labs across the country,” Mittleman says. “With more researchers taking an interest in T-rays, we’re well on our way to answering some of the fundamental questions that must be addressed for the field to progress.” The research is funded by Advanced Micro Devices Inc., the Welch Foundation, and the National Science Foundation and was reported in the April 21 issue of Physical Review Letters.
The National Institutes of Health has awarded Rice University’s Institute of Biosciences and Bioengineering (IBB) a fiveyear, $2.1 million grant to fund interdisciplinary training in biotechnology for 10 graduate students each year. The award will provide two-year appointments in biotechnology-related fields for second- and thirdyear doctoral students, who will compete based on academic performance and research potential. All appointees will take core courses in biotechnology and research ethics and will participate in leadership training and industrial internships. “Advances in biotechnology are impacting our world in tremendous ways,” says Jennifer West, the Isabel C. Cameron Professor of Bioengineering, professor in chemical and biomolecular engineering, and director of IBB. “It is of utmost importance that talented students receive appropriate training and research experiences to maintain U.S. competitiveness in biotechnology.” —Jade Boyd
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New Program to Examine Border Issues A new program funded primarily by the Houston Endowment Inc. at Rice’s James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy will focus on immigration and other sensitive and critical issues along the U.S.–Mexico border. The U.S.–Mexico Border Project will define problems, organize scholarly task forces to conduct research, formulate proposals, and engage politicians at the highest levels of government in the United States and Mexico. Eduardo Elizondo will serve as program coordinator. “Border issues include drug trafficking and security as well as immigration, so the policy issues are acutely relevant not just to Houston and Texas but the rest of the nation as well,” says Edward Djerejian, director of the Baker Institute. “The integrated overview of the border region that we are planning should help address problems that are currently the source of serious tensions between two close neighbors. Ultimately, the program will attempt nothing less than to reduce tensions, improve quality of life, and establish a working partnership between two great nations.” Issues on the agenda include: • Immigration, both legal and illegal, and its impact on the United States’s wage structure, labor market, public school systems, public hospital systems, private medical facilities, and political clout • Homeland security, including the screening for potential terrorists and weapons • Drug trafficking • The environment, including air pollution in the United States that originates from agricultural fires in Central Mexico, and limited water supply for agricultural, industrial, and household use Elizondo will be responsible for organizing the task forces and planning a future conference at the Baker Institute on border issues. He will visit Mexico to meet potential program participants and talk with Mexicans who live and work on the border to expand the program’s perspective and encourage grassroots involvement. —B. J. Almond
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Virtual Houston H
ouston mayor Bill White recently announced the creation of the online Museum of Houston, a cooperative effort among the city’s leading educational institutions, cultural organizations, and public archives to create a digital storehouse of historic resources relating to Houston’s rich and colorful past. Houston Endowment Inc. has approved a $350,000 grant to Greater Houston Preservation Alliance (GHPA) to fund the first two years of the project, on which Rice University is collaborating. Houston’s public and private archives contain a treasure trove of information, but concerns about safety and security often mean these materials are not available for widespread use. Recent innovations in digital technology, however, make historic resources accessible to the largest possible audience, while preserving and protecting irreplaceable documents and artifacts. By providing broad public access to digitized materials, the Museum of Houston will allow users to conduct individualized searches at their convenience without requiring extensive visits to several different locations. “Houston has a rich, diverse history, and if we can harness new technology to expose more people to it, so much the better,” White says. “It took many people to build Houston into the great city it is. In that tradition, we have a great team building this virtual museum today and for the future.” Fifteen institutions and organizations are cooperating in the first phase of the project. GHPA is administering the grant, and Rice’s Fondren Library is collaborating to provide technical expertise through arrangements made by Chuck Henry, vice provost and university librarian. The Herzstein Foundation is providing bridge funding to initiate the project, and JPMorgan Chase is offering office space for the project staff. As the project grows, many other groups will contribute resources to the museum. “From its inception, Rice has been engaged with Houston, and the future of the university is intricately wound up with
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Disability and the Job Applicant this great city,” says Rice president David Leebron. “Our ability to serve and learn from Houston extends well beyond the offering of formal educational programs. We have an inherent interest in helping preserve the colorful history of the nation’s fourth-largest city in a digital museum that can be accessed not just by university students and scholars doing research but also by schoolchildren and citizens who are curious about Houston and its origin.” The Museum of Houston will offer something for everyone interested in Houston history: scholars, teachers, students, genealogists, and the general public. The site eventually will contain hundreds of thousands of digitized letters and documents, publications, maps, photographs, artwork, audio, and video. The site’s search engine will look for documents on a specific topic, place, or point in time. All documents, including handwritten manuscripts and letters, will be fully text-search capable. The museum also will feature extensive virtual exhibits. The first exhibit, tracing the development and impact of the Port of Houston, currently is under development. The Port of Houston Authority is giving the museum access to its significant collection of historic documents, photographs, and publications for the inaugural exhibit. The project staff, headed by Permita Derden, will work from the historic JPMorgan Chase Building downtown. Phase one of the Museum of Houston provides a preview of the site’s capabilities. Initial features include a podcast of the mayor introducing the museum. The site also includes samples of the types of resources that will be accessible through the Museum of Houston. Targeted for release in spring 2007, phase two will focus on the Port of Houston virtual exhibit. For a preview of the online museum’s capabilities, visit the preliminary website at www.museumofhouston.org.
When it comes to revealing a physical disability during a job interview, apparently, timing is everything. A concern of many physically disabled individuals is deciding whether or not to acknowledge a stigmatizing condition during an interview. While studies in the past have shown it is better for physically disabled job candidates to acknowledge their disability, new research by Rice psychologist Mikki Hebl suggests that the time chosen to reveal the disability is equally important in making an impression on a potential employer. Because job interviews are based largely on first impressions, applicants’ straight-forward, immediate attention to their physical condition seems to be viewed more positively by employers than if they wait later in the interview or don’t acknowledge it at all. In the study, titled “Acknowledging One’s Physical Disability in the Interview: Does ‘When’ Make a Difference?” and published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Hebl and Jeanine Skorinko ’01 presented the first empirical evidence that timing does make a difference. The researchers found that applicants who disclosed their disability at the beginning or middle of the interview rather than at the end or not at all created more favorable impressions with evaluators, who tended to like and respect those candidates, indicated they would hire them, and thought they would be intelligent workers. Applicants who acknowledged their disability at the beginning were considered to be better-adjusted psychologically, and female evaluators, in particular, rated them as happier and more capable. “Our findings confirm that acknowledging a disability can be a successful strategy when job hunting, particularly when used at the initial stages of the interview process,” Hebl says. “If an applicant doesn’t acknowledge a physical disability, the interviewer might be guided by stereotypes and view the candidate as poorly adjusted, unhappy, and incapable. Acknowledgments, however, lead directly to increased perceptions of welladjustment, which result in improved ratings from evaluators.” —Pam Sheridan
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Martel Senior Publishes Research on Injuries from Lawn Mowers When Vanessa Costilla ’06 was 6 years old, she jumped into the bed of her father’s pickup truck, only to slip and fall onto the concrete driveway. “The next day, I couldn’t eat, and the room was spinning, so my mom started to worry,” she says. A trip to the hospital made the problem clear. “I had a blood clot in my brain,” Costilla recalls, “and I had to have surgery.” That hospital stay would change Costilla’s life forever. “I just remember that something was always happening in the hospital,” she says. “I loved the hustle and bustle, and I was amazed that the doctor actually could make me better.” Costilla’s fascination with hospitals and medicine was reaffirmed in high school, when she volunteered at a local hospital. After coming to Rice University, where she majored in economics and managerial studies, Costilla decided to take the science classes required for medical school. “I think knowledge in the areas of my majors will carry over into the hospital when I get out of medical school,” she says. That seems likely if the research Costilla conducted as an undergraduate is any indication. She spent a summer as an intern at Johns Hopkins University, working with David Bishai from Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health, and received national attention for a study of lawn mower-related injuries. Bishai suggested the subject after seeing such injuries firsthand as a doctor in the emergency room. “I’m interested in rural healthcare,” Costilla says, “so this topic tied in perfectly.” Using survey data, Costilla and Bishai found that nearly 80,000 Americans a year visit hospitals for mower-related injuries. The study was published in the April edition of the Annals of Emergency Medicine, and Costilla is the first author on the paper. Working closely with Bishai, Costilla conducted the research during summer 2005, but she continued to work on the research paper throughout her senior year at Rice. “We performed some additional analysis during the fall semester, and I did most of the revising for publication during winter break,” she says. “Needless to say, this paper kept me busy well past the summer I spent at Johns Hopkins.” Research will be part of her career after medical school, Costilla says. She even has taken on a new interest in healthcare policy. “There are lots of important issues in healthcare that need to be dealt with,” she says. “I definitely want to have a practice in West Texas because I feel the population there needs it, but I want to make larger contributions too.” Costilla is excited to be attending Texas Tech University’s School of Medicine. “I can’t imagine doing anything else.” —Lindsey Fielder
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STUDENTS IN THE NEWS Grad Student Wins Hertz Fellowship Rice University bioengineering graduate student Elizabeth “Libby” Stephens has been named one of the prestigious 2006 Hertz Fellows by the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation. Each year, the Hertz Foundation awards 15 graduate student fellowships, which are considered to be some the nation’s most elite and competitive endowments. Only 3 percent of applicants from 43 research universities receive appointments. The fellowships are available only to students studying engineering or applied sciences, with a strong emphasis on the physical sciences. Stephens, who completed her undergraduate studies at Yale and the University of California at San Diego, is studying the biomechanics, microstructure, and cell biology of congenitally deformed heart valves in the Medical Scientist Training Program, a joint program offered by Baylor College of Medicine and Rice that allows students to undertake PhD studies from Rice while simultaneously earning a medical degree from Baylor. A student in the laboratory of Jane Grande-Allen, assistant professor in bioengineering, Stephens hopes to complete her PhD program in 2010 and her medical degree in 2011. The Hertz Fellowship covers tuition and fees, and it can be renewed for up to five years. It also includes a $28,000 stipend for the year. Stephens is the third Rice student in three years to receive the Hertz Fellowship.
Kailas String Quartet Wins Silver Medal Rice University’s quartet-in-residence, the Kailas String Quartet, recently won the silver medal for the senior string division at the Fischoff National Chamber Music Association Competition. The Fischoff competition provides an opportunity for the education and development of young
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people through its nationally acclaimed chamber music competition, educational residencies, and community concerts. Quar tet members Jor y Fankuchen, violin; Stephanie Fong, violin; John Posadas, viola; and Emmanuelle Bergeron, cello, first performed together at the Tanglewood Music Center in Lennox, Massachusetts. The group officially became the Kailas String Quartet in December 2004. At Rice, the quartet works under the guidance of the Shepherd School of Music faculty members James Dunham, professor of viola and chamber music; Norman Fischer, professor of cello; and Kenneth Goldsmith, professor of violin. The group already has performed for members of the Emerson, Juilliard, Muir, and Orion string quartets, and over the summer, the Kailas String Quartet was one of a select few groups to participate in the Advanced String Quartet Program at the Aspen Music Festival and School.
Leadership Rice Honors Students with New Leadership Certificates Five current and former students— Jeremy Beasley, Meredith Gray, Megan Gray, Isabella Pacheco, and Megan Wilmot—have completed the Leadership Certificate Program, the first group of Rice students to do so. The Leadership Certificate Program is an opportunity for students to hone their leadership capacities in a variety of settings. In addition to completing academic requirements, students also must use their leadership skills on campus, in the community, and even in a foreign country. “I chose to participate in the certificate program because it required things that I already knew I wanted to do in college, like community service and study abroad,” said Pacheco ’06. “This made me do the things that I might not have made time for otherwise.” The final component of the certificate program is a capstone project where students must take
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their understanding of leadership and tackle a real-world problem on campus or in the community. Wilmot, who graduated in May, said the process taught her how to effectively work with others. “I thought a leadership program would teach me how to boss people around,” she said. “But it was quite the opposite.”
Rice Architect Student Wins Travel Fellowship Cathlyn Newell, who received her master’s of architecture from Rice in May, is one of three students to earn a 2006 travel fellowship from the Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) Foundation. The fellowships and study grants offer recent graduates the rare opportunity to complete selfdetermined travel itineraries that complement their college studies and professional interests. Only a handful of such awards exist, and, to date, the foundation has given more than $1 million to architecture, design, and engineering students. Newell earned the grand SOM Prize—a $50,000 research and travel grant created this year to celebrate the foundation’s 25th anniversary. The special prize enables Newell to do in-depth research, collaborate with other designers, and pursue independent study outside the realm of established patterns. She will visit six Nordic countries to study the effects extreme weather conditions have on the design of structures and building sites. Her research has timely implications as architects and engineers grapple with the aftermath of recent natural disasters and continue to expand on the promise of environmentally conscious design. Newell, who earned her undergraduate degree in architecture from Georgia Tech, currently is an entry-level designer with Office dA in Boston. “I am intrigued by the atmosphere of a site, the weather patterns, time of day, and seasons, and, more importantly, how the amplification of these forces impacts our experience of a place,” explains Newell. “This fellowship is an incredible opportunity to
build on my research and begin to understand how architects can create structures that fully study, integrate, and celebrate the natural forces that are already present.”
Students from the Shepherd School Shine on Kennedy Center’s Stage For the third consecutive year, the Shepherd School of Music was invited to participate in the Kennedy Center’s Conservatory Project, a program designed to introduce audiences to the top young musical artists in classical music, jazz, musical theater, and opera from the nation’s leading undergraduate and graduate conservatories, colleges, and universities. Seven of the Shepherd School’s best and brightest students showcased their talents May 5 at one of the best-known venues in the country, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.: Aidan Soder, mezzo soprano, and Kris Becker, piano, performing works by Brahms and Karim Al-Zand, the Lynette S. Autrey Assistant Professor of Composition and Theory at the Shepherd School; Rebecca Corruccini, violin, and Jennifer Yeo, piano, performing works by Ravel and Kreissler; Maiko Sasaki, clarinet, and, Kana Mimaki, piano, performing works by Leonard Bernstein; and Wenli Zhou, piano, performing works by Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Scriabin. The seven-day series of concerts also included students from Berklee College of Music, the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester, the Juilliard School, Northwestern University School of Music, the Peabody Conservatory of Music at Johns Hopkins University, and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. —Reported by Jennifer Evans, Lindsey Fielder, and Arie Wilson
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Hands-on Learning:
The Baker Institute’s Summer in D.C. Internship Program
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By M itch K a pl a n • P hoto g r a ph y by J eff F itlow
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into the Chinese teahouse ching ching CHA in Washington, D.C.’s, Georgetown neighborhood on certain summer Saturday afternoons, and you’ll see them. Eight young women and men—plus one engaging middle-aged man—seated on large floor cushions around a low-set table, surrounded by piles of books and papers. They’ll be sipping tea and conversing with quiet, earnest intensity. Georgetown being home to several universities, logic says this must be a university class of some sort. And indeed, those gathered around the table are collegians, but they’re not from a local school. This is a select group of Rice University students participating in the Jesse Jones Leadership Center Summer in D.C. Policy Research Program sponsored by the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy.
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The Baker Institute’s staff created the Summer in D.C. program in 2004 to offer students a unique opportunity that blends the institute’s on-campus capabilities with the kind of hands-on experience only the nation’s capital can offer. “We’re trying to take advantage of the fact that we have excellent undergrads at Rice who are increasingly interested in public policy and also take advantage of the fact that, at the Baker Institute, we have research projects with good visibility and connections to Washington in particular,” explains program coordinator Steven Lewis. “The institute is trying to help train the next generation of policy researchers, so we thought we’d take advantage of those resources and support Rice undergrads to go to D.C. during the summer.” Many universities maintain internship programs, especially in Washington, D.C., but two elements set the Baker Institute’s approach apart. One is the major financial support the program receives from Houston Endowment Inc., plus additional support from Anne Armstrong, the Eason-Weinmann Foundation, Kenneth Franzheim, Roy Huffington, Edward Ney, Peter Secchia, the Salgo Trust for Education, and C. Howard Wilkins. This funding enables the institute to provide students with a generous summer living stipend. “This program is unique in that it’s student oriented,” Lewis says. “It’s up to them to get the internship, but we provide the support.” That support allows the students to concentrate on their work, which ties in to the program’s second differentiating factor: its academic emphasis. Students read required texts and participate in three seminars during their stay in D.C. At the end of the program, they write a follow-up report and give a presentation before faculty and institute researchers. On completion of their reports, they receive a final honorarium. “It’s all directed at helping them toward a future career in policy and analysis,” Lewis says. The Acceptance Process While the Baker Institute shares its campus building with the School of Social Science, the institute itself doesn’t offer classes. That means it must work continuously to raise awareness of the program. “We put out the word in a host of ways,” says Lewis. “We have been using email blasts, advertisements in the Thresher, and information sessions with the help of past participants.” The program supports eight students. This past year, approximately 20 went through the application process, during which candidates propose what they want to do with their internship and explain why they’re seeking a stipend. A committee of researchers reviews the proposals, ranks them, and chooses the top submissions, plus alternates.
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While the Baker Institute provides the stipend for living and working in D.C., it’s up to the students to find their own internships—a search that can require resourcefulness. As might be expected of this generation’s students, the Internet often functions as a primary search tool. “I was looking on Idealist.org,” says Laura Szarmach ’07, who interned at the Advocacy Project, a human rights organization. “It constantly updates job listings from a wide range of nonprofits and civil–social groups.” Chris Aresu ’08, who worked at the Coalition for American Leadership Abroad, found his spot through a Google search. Others find jobs through personal connections and references. Senior Saira Karim ’07, for example, found hers at the Middle East Institute after the Baker Institute’s Energy Forum director, Amy Myers Jaffe, recommended she apply. Many, like Kathryn Wheat ’07, combine those resources. Wheat sought advice from Kirstin Matthews, a Baker Institute science and technology research assistant with whom she had studied. She asked other Rice students as well. “They gave me suggestions, and one was the Department of State, which has an online application,” she says. “I found my position there by doing a web search.” Being an intern, of course, often can involve less-than-glamorous daily responsibilities—gofer tasks, making coffee, hours by the copy machine, and daily trips to the post office—but not the Summer in D.C. interns, who assume an impressive degree of responsibility. “My work involves compiling data, reports, and the latest news on AIDS in Africa and keeping statistics on what’s in the news and in Congress,” says Christina Lagos ’08, who interned at Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa (DATA), a nonprofit organization that aims to raise awareness of, and spark responses to, African crises. “The Global Health Council had a conference on HIV and AIDS incidence, looking to see if they’re declining,” Lagos says. “I kept notes and reported to the organization. The week before, I went to the National Institutes of Medicine for a meeting on public health and how physicians are being trained to meet community health needs locally and abroad.” Lagos’s responsibilities also included tracking media coverage—“figuring out which newspapers and reporters are writing about the developing world and the health crisis, what drives them to write about it, and what’s compelling and attracts the public,” she explains. “I tried to help develop the organization’s relationship with the media.” Impressive too has been the students’ ability to gain positions in organizations that are devoted to their interests. Sarah Perelstein ’07 worked at the Humane Society’s Gaithersburg, Maryland, office. “Ultimately I want to become a lawyer,” she says. “I’m
interested in environmental law and animal rights. This is the closest thing I’ve done to match my interest.” Szarmach’s work at the Advocacy Project tied into her concern about “a variety of issues in the developing world and advocacy projects for human rights,” she says. Wheat’s assignment at the Department of State’s Bureau of Science and Technology brought her into daily contact with George Atkinson, the bureau’s advisor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “I saw him daily,” she says. “He usually checked in with me and the other interns once or twice a week to make sure we were doing the research we wanted to do and were involved in the office. He was really accessible.” It’s this kind of access—to people, organizations, and events in the capital—that affords the Summer in D.C. interns the greatest benefit. “A lot of people I worked with were really out to help the interns make connections or, in general, give us proceedings from reports and other reading material to enrich us,” Wheat says. “I got to make phone calls to the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about upcoming projects and go to meetings on my own.” For Vivek Gopalan ’07, who interned at the Center for American Progress, access to events proved special. “The center puts on a lot of forums with leading policy experts in the field. There’s one almost every other day,” he says. “You learn almost all the things that are going on in the world—you get a tie to things that are happening today but also the broader implications. There was one about Africa, another on economic policy with New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. On my first day, there was one on the federal marriage amendment with all kinds of constitutional scholars.” Globalization Over Chinese Tea Getting their work done and interacting with policymakers are only parts of these students’ responsibilities. They arrive in Washington “lugging a suitcase full of books,” as Lewis puts it. Interns make their way through two centuries of thinking about globalization—from classic political economy texts of the 19th and 20th centuries to modern social theory on global affairs of the past two decades. “The globalization of policymaking has been the main theme,” explains Lewis. “We try to cover both the historical background of how societies respond to globalization—the classic Western texts on social theory—and a wide range of policy issue areas, including key theoretical and methodological debates.” Reading and analyzing these texts constitutes a major portion of the interns’ workload and serves as a launching pad for open discussions on a wide range of topics—from
The 2006 Summer in D.C. alumni are a dynamic, enterprising, engaged, and energetic group. Here’s a snapshot of who they are. Chris Aresu ’08, Wiess College Hometown: Houston, Texas Major: Economics, Political Science D.C. Internship: Coalition for American Leadership Abroad Quote: “As far as current events, politics, and foreign affairs go in Washington, D.C., you just breathe it in. Just being there allowed me to be so much more informed. Just the fact that the government is all around and Capitol Hill is so close, you’re immersed. You soak it up, and it’s great. I wish everybody had the opportunity to work there and see how Congress really works and how laws are really passed.” Kirti Datla ’08, Sid Richardson College Hometown: Houston, Texas Major: Environmental Engineering, Policy Studies D.C. Internship: U.S. State Department, Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, Office of Oceans Affairs Quote: “Being at the State Department, especially while the whaling meeting was going on, was fantastic. It involved a lot of strategy and diplomacy. And being in such a historic city is great. On my first day, I randomly picked a direction and walked, and the White House just appeared right in front of me. I told myself I wouldn’t be a tourist, but I couldn’t help it. I pressed my face right up against the fence.” Vivek Gopalan ’07, Will Rice College Hometown: Las Cruces, New Mexico Major: History, Political Science D.C. Internship: Center for American Progress Quote: “I love Washington. I’m a politics junkie. I like the fact that you can run into a senator on the street. I can name and identify most of them. I like the idea of D.C.— right there, there’s the Capitol building. I walked out of my office one day, and on the street corner was Newt Gingrich. It’s sort of my Hollywood, I guess.” Saira Karim ’07, Lovett College Hometown: Houston, Texas Major: Policy Studies, Religious Studies, Political Science D.C. Internship: Middle East Institute Quote: “At end of the internship, Dr. Weinbaum, a scholar-in-residence at the Middle East Institute, wanted me to present an overall briefing and give my perspective and my recommendations. It’s an analytical role—I brought all the information together, tied it together, and got a handle on it. He’ll be using my material for speeches he gives in the fall. I learned how to be more involved in public service, how to get a job in the State Department, and how to run for office—insightful things that you don’t pick up in a university setting.”
Christina Lagos ’08, Wiess College Hometown: Dunedin, Florida Major: Policy Studies, Psychology (Health Policy Track—International Health) D.C. Internship: Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa Quote: “It gave me a chance to apply what I learned in school and to work in the world of public policy. There’s only so much an intern can do in one summer, but I realized any assignment or task we were given was part of a bigger picture. The information I gave to the directors who are busy with grander projects was somehow important. Anyone involved is part of solving the problems. Being in Washington was an incredible learning experience.” Sarah Perelstein ’07, Brown College Hometown: Rye, New York Major: Asian Studies, History D.C. Internship: Humane Society Quote: “It was the first time I was involved in something I’m so interested in. I benefited by getting to know what was going on with the whole organization. The most important part was that I got a better idea of whether this is actually what I want to do someday, and I realize that it is. I have such a high opinion of Rice because my interests are bit obscure, and it lets me have a voice and provides me with help. I’m really grateful for the opportunity.” Laura Szarmach ’07, Brown College Hometown: San Antonio, Texas Major: History D.C. Internship: The Advocacy Project Quote: “I gained a basic level of experience in a government organization and the kind of advocacy work it does and the role it can play. In some ways these issues— like human rights—are being put in the right context, and I’m understanding them more. I’ll probably go to law school eventually, but right now, I want to understand better the work of nongovernmental organizations [NGOs] and how I might do pro bono work or work directly for one in future. Pressure from NGOs has made a lot of difference in trade and human rights. That’s exciting to see.” Kathryn Wheat ’07, Wiess College Hometown: Houston, Texas Major: Philosophy, Premed D.C. Internship: Department of State, Office of the Science and Technology Advisor to the Secretary Quote: “Working with the State Department and with the book choices that Dr. Lewis gave us made me a lot more aware of things that are going on. Knowing the status of other countries and how we interact with them—that’s enlightening. The reading really complemented the internship in Washington. The things I saw in the city and that I picked up on in my books really enhanced my education.”
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Kathryn Wheat
Kirti Datla
Saira Karim
Laura Szarmach
Sarah Perelstein
Christina Lagos
Vivek Gopalan Fall ’06
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“I have been considering working in government for a long time. To be at the State Department and to meet people from different areas of U.S. government gives me a better —Kirti Datla idea about where I want to be in the future.”
foreign policy to science and technology policy and from trade policy to cultural and legal reform policy. “The goal is to show them they are not the first generation of policy researchers to try to tackle the challenges posed by globalization,” Lewis says. “We discuss how the classic explanations and methods inform current policy theorists and show them that, in the current policy debates, there are a wide range of disciplinary approaches and innovative methods that can be applied.” It’s for these sessions that the interns gather at ching ching CHA, where each student gets a chance to lead the week’s book discussion. Despite—or perhaps because of—the heavy reading load, the students universally appreciate what they’re learning and experiencing. “It’s a wonderful opportunity,” comments Karim. “It’s very enlightening. You hear a lot of people’s ideas, but you present on your own. You’re responsible for leading the discussion, so you get to hone those skills, think outside the box, and apply those ideas to the current time. I was able to increase my knowledge on how the economy and globalization relate in the larger picture.” “It was definitely alarming at first to see the stack of books,” Lagos says. “But after looking at the titles, it was really exciting because lots of the reading was so pertinent and relevant to what I was doing in my work. It’s an inspiration to read and see the academic basis, to see what was going on in my organization and in D.C. The semi-
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nars were great—I couldn’t have asked for a more intellectual and real-life experience at the same time.” After these all-afternoon discussions over tea, the group repaired to a good Georgetown restaurant to continue talking and to socialize over dinner. The students were joined for one mid-July meal by Adele Morris ’85, an economist with the Department of the Treasury. Morris gladly answered questions covering topics ranging from her own career biography to what it’s like to attend White House meetings. The students paid particular attention when she contrasted the working environments during the Clinton and current Bush administrations. Whenever possible, Lewis connects the students to Rice alumni living in the D.C. area. The interns prize his effort and also gain added value from it. Indeed, by dinner’s end, Morris had offered to introduce at least two students to people working in government agencies. Professional stimulation in D.C. is all around, and these students were quick to take advantage. As Aresu points out, “One of the great things about being there is that some things you learn might not be directly related to work—seminars, speakers, things you can get into without charge that can open your mind to different possibilities of work and study.” Aresu cites a summer lecture series on Oman and U.S. policy staged by the National Council on U.S.–Arab Relations at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies
at Johns Hopkins University. “They have speakers for two hours, two times a week,” he says. “It’s like a free seminar class for the entire summer. I learned a lot about the country of Oman and U.S.–Middle East relations in general.” Sometimes the opportunities reach beyond Washington. “There is an International AIDS Conference in Toronto in August, the largest gathering of scientists, policy experts, national representatives, and people living with AIDS,” Lagos says. “My internship director asked me to come up with a proposal outlining the conference and why DATA should attend, which track is best, and who from DATA should go and why. He noticed my interest in HIV/AIDS and health policy, so he told me to include a compelling argument on why I should attend the conference as well.” In It for the Long Run Clearly the students’ Washington experience holds great benefit, but the Jones program has loftier, long-term goals for these budding scholars. “We believe it’s helpful to have our internships take place in the sophomore or junior year,” Lewis explains. “Then they can use their experience as a guide to future research and to apply for something prestigious like Fulbright, Truman, Rhodes, Boren, Wagoner, and other advanced-study scholarships.” The 2006 interns understand the long-
term advantages of the program. “Working with the State Department and reading the books Dr. Lewis assigned made me a lot more aware of things that are going on,” says Wheat, a philosophy/premed major. “I want to go into pediatrics or family practice. I’m learning about politics and government because there’s going to be a lot of changes in politics nationally and in Texas—like Social Security—and it’s good to know where people are coming from. I’m also considering getting a master’s in public health. Then I could be a practicing physician, but it would allow me to participate in task forces or boards or work with universities in research about public health issues.” Kirti Datla ’07 presents another illustration. Interning at the State Department’s Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs in the Office of Oceans Affairs, she was able to have lunch with a woman who was working on a treaty Datla was interested in. “Certainly, understanding how the State Department works is beneficial, simply because there are a lot of misconceptions about the bureaucracy,” Datla says. “It’s a fantastic place to work and to establish a career. I have been considering working in government for a long time. To be at the State Department and to meet people from different areas of U.S. government gives me a better idea about where I want to be in the future.” Past summer interns like Norain Khan and Jason Lee, who both graduated in 2006, are evidence of the program’s success helping
students reach postgraduation goals. Khan, a 2004 intern at the Middle East Institute, is pursuing a master’s degree at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship, doing comparative research on veiling among women in the Muslim diaspora of the United States and the United Kingdom. “Having the opportunity to participate in this program had a strong influence on the options I had after graduation,” she says. “I made a lot of personal connections and started to think about my work more seriously. Dr. Lewis was a big help in working on the scholarship. He helped me make connections with scholars in England.” Lee spent summer 2005 interning at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Now he’s a Fulbright scholar studying in China. The internship, he says, “gave me focus on the topics and the aspects of U.S.–China relations that I’m interested in. I got exposure to experts in the field and the opportunity to meet other students and researchers working on the same things I was. It was a hands-on experience you don’t get in the classroom. I brought what I learned from that experience to the proposal I drew up for my Fulbright application. It helped me make an educated decision whether this is really something I want to do.” The Baker Institute’s Summer in D.C. program is flourishing, and for that—in keeping with his personality—Lewis credits the people around him. “It helps that we have enthusiastic support from the Baker Institute leadership, including Ambassador
Edward Djerejian, our director; Maggie Cryer, our former administrator; Allen Matusow, associate director for academic programs; and staffers Jason Lyons and Lisa McCaffety,” he says. “The last two, in particular, have done the nuts-and-bolts work to get the stipends to the students and so forth. It has been a team effort. And of course, the researchers also have been supportive. They help us select the participants, and they also help provide feedback on their research reports at a presentation session early in the fall semester. It’s stressful for the participants, of course, but they learn much from it.” “The Baker Institute was really helpful,” says Lee. “When you’re in class, reading and writing, you have no idea of what the real world applications are. The program really helped me get an idea of what I want to do.” Perhaps Gopalan summarizes the interns’ feeling best when he says, “I think it’s one of the most amazing programs. The stipend gives you the opportunity to really concentrate on the internship and do public service. The seminars are personally enriching—you’d never read this many books for your leisure. It’s amazing that Rice has this program and gives students this much opportunity.”
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on Success By Aruni Gunasegaram and Pam Losefsky
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Photography by Tommy LaVergne
The next time you retrieve cash from a machine without walking into the bank, or the next time you slap down your little plastic debit card to buy lunch, you can thank Jimmy Treybig ’63. Before Treybig became the founder, CEO, and chair of Tandem Computer Corporation, there were no reliable credit cards or debit card transaction processing systems, and the ATMs that did exist weren’t very secure. Treybig is the architect of the fault-tolerant computer, a device so ubiquitous in the world today that life without it is practically unimaginable.
B
ack in 1974, people still stood in line to deposit paychecks, paid for groceries with cash, and put big purchases like furniture on layaway plans. It was Treybig’s vision for parallel computing, which enabled financial service firms to establish the foundation for electronic money, that changed these cumbersome processes and made modern life in the Western world possible. And the groundwork was laid during his undergraduate days at Rice University. A ham radio enthusiast, Treybig entered Rice in 1959 with a love for electronics and majored in electrical engineering. While computers had not yet arrived in Houston, by the late 1950s and early 1960s, the physics, math, and technology taught in the engineering program served him well. “Rice gave me a foundation in how to think, and that is far more important today than anything I could have learned about a computer then,” he says. “Even my art history class was valuable.” If the electrical engineering program imparted analytical thinking, it was Treybig’s experience working on the college newspaper that sparked his interest in business. Working for his good friend, Dan Tompkins ’63, he made about $500 selling ads for the Thresher during one year, but when he found out that Tompkins had pulled down nearly $16,000 in the same time period, he realized there were a few things about business he’d better learn. A quick study, Treybig took over the business manager position for the Campanile the following year and hired someone else to sell the ads. He made a lot more than $500 that year. With this first business lesson behind him, he resolved to start his own company, but he knew he still had a lot more to learn.
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“I intrinsically understood that success in business was about skills. I wanted to start a company, but I didn’t have the skills to do it. I knew I had to develop them.” —Jimmy Treybig
Building Skills Before Building a Business “I intrinsically understood that success in business was about skills,” Treybig remembers. “I wanted to start a company, but I didn’t have the skills to do it. I knew I had to develop them.” As soon as he was out of college, the first job he took was selling instrumentation for Texas Instruments. Why did he take a job as a salesman? Precisely because he had skill-building in mind, and although he was fairly sociable and outgoing, he wasn’t a salesman. “At first I had to have my wife go with me to make cold calls,” he laughs. “She’d literally have to push me out of the car because I was so nervous.” But by deliberately placing himself in an uncomfortable position and forcing himself to develop skills that establish direct business relationships with people, he was able to add an indispensable tool to his kit. “Learning to sell not only your products but also yourself is one of the most important things you need to learn in life,” he affirms. Next stop on the skill-development train was Stanford University. “While getting my MBA at Stanford,” he says, “I learned about organizational theory, marketing, finance, and accounting.” All, he says, are necessary skills for a future CEO. One thing you can’t learn in business school, however, is how to manage. That requires on-the-job training, and Treybig was well aware that managerial jobs were hard to come by, especially for 26-year-olds. So, when he was offered a job working in the new computer division of Hewlett Packard (HP) with Tom Perkins, a man who would later become extremely influential in his life, he had one stipulation: “My main requirement was that I eventually would manage at least 20 people.” Perkins agreed, and after Treybig had cycled through a couple different positions, he was promoted to marketing manager for commercial computers, where he oversaw four groups that sold computers in different industries: finance and banking, manufacturing, and publishing. He spent five years at HP developing his
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managerial skills and, at the same time, became savvy about the commercial computer market at a time when few people had any inkling of its immeasurable potential. A Business Opportunity Emerges Commercial data processing at that time was enabled by either batch or real-time computing, explains Treybig. This was the era of punch cards and mainframe computers the size of a small “Jimmy is constantly stressing the house that had limited uses and importance of paying attention to weren’t available to the general the people in management and public. throughout the company. He is the The challenge for the era’s board member who I go to when technologists was to increase I need advice on personnel issystem performance, and difsues. Although Jimmy would never ferent industries were tryboast about this, he was awarded ing various solutions to solve the Torch of Liberty Award by the unique performance and availAnti-Defamation League (ADL) ability issues. “In the publishin 1983. The award is given by ing industry, for instance,” the ADL to business leaders who Treybig explains, “companies demonstrate a commitment to end would have two IBM systems. bigotry and racism. Jimmy had an If one failed, they’d take the above-average number of women paper tape and reload it into and minorities in his management the other one. So they were team and throughout the company using redundancy to achieve at Tandem, and he won the award availability, which was very for his efforts to create a diverse expensive.” workforce.” As Treybig learned more —Scott Eckert about the market for what CEO of Motion Computing would later be called faulttolerant systems, he estimated the potential. “I decided that if I could start from scratch and build a computer that would not fail
Successful Companies Require Successful Teams Successful companies are run by successful teams. As a venture capitalist, JimmyTreybig analyzes the potential of start-up enterprises by evaluating the team. He believes that people are the reason companies become wildly successful, therefore management teams that have the following characteristics are the ones in which he prefers to invest: •
The members are smart, highly motivated individuals who have achieved success in their life in some form (e.g., sports, business, etc.).
The members are cohesive and enthusiastic.
•
•
Some of the members have start-up experience. If the management team thinks just like a much larger, perhaps similar, company, it will not find the major differences that let it win. Management teams whose members hail from a variety of companies and a variety of industries have stronger cross-functional capabilities and will be better able to weather creative challenges.
Most of the executive team is in place. Although the management team does not initially need all of its members in place, it is extremely beneficial if the CEO position is filled. If the CEO has led a start-up before, that’s even better. If the CEO has not held that position before, he or she must have great leadership qualities, be confident, be a good listener, and have a record of hiring outstanding people.
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The members have diverse backgrounds not only in regard to company size and variety of industries but also in gender and race. If you start without diversity on your team, it is very difficult to achieve it later. Diversity is extremely important to be competitive in today’s worldwide economy. A team comprised of all white men will be less likely to relate to, for example, the Chinese or Japanese and is less likely to take advantage of a significant portion of the available outstanding people in the workforce. Given the world’s diversity, statistics dictate that the best people are spread among different races, religions, ethnicities, and genders. And in today’s global and consumer-driven markets, white males are likely better off with input from women and people of different ethnicities.
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Jimmy Treybig visits one of the residents of his Austin-area ranch.
Jimmy Treybig with his wife, Drew
and that was good at transaction processing, I would have something.” The new architecture would have to be maintained and expanded while it was working on transactions, and data would need to be protected in the event of a failure. Moreover, the computer would have to work via a communications line to enable live updating, and it would have to be cost-effective. It was a tall order, but as Treybig wrapped his mind around this business idea, he made one more skill-building move. Following his mentor Tom Perkins, who had left HP to form the venture capital firm Kleiner & Perkins—which eventually became Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers (KPCB), one of the world’s foremost such companies—Treybig joined as the firm’s fifth employee, working as an associate. “The benefit to me of working at KPCB was learning from Tom,” Treybig says. And being able to see start-ups from the venture capital perspective was illuminating. “You learn about what it takes to start a successful firm and how to raise money,” Treybig explains. “It gives you a whole different perspective—the venture capitalist sees a lot that the entrepreneur doesn’t see.” In 1974, when he was 34 years old, Treybig was ready to venture out on his own. He knew the market opportunity inside out, he had a wide array of skills, he had incredible connections, and he had arrived at what he believed was the solution to the 100 percent availability problem: parallelism. As Treybig conceived it, multiple processors with the capacity to handle the maximum load run simultaneously (or in tandem), and if one fails, it isolates itself and, while the others continue to do its work, it corrects the problem. Having discovered the way to conduct reliable transaction processing, he founded Tandem Computers that year and delivered its first product two years later. The company issued public stock in 1977, and by 1980, it was dubbed the fastest growing public company in America by INC. magazine. In 1984, Tandem made the Fortune 500, and when it was sold, it was a $2.5 billion company. Treybig founded Tandem on the premise of identifying and
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understanding the market and the market needs before building the products. It was an uncommon strategy at the time, but it proved to be a huge financial success. “The first customers were exactly who we thought they’d be—the financial institutions, banks, and stock exchanges,” Treybig says. The first wave of commercial use of Tandem’s systems gave way to a myriad of telecommunications and electronic commerce applications in the years to come, leading to the electronic age as we now know it. The impact of reliable transaction processing on the evolution of computers and networking simply cannot be “What makes Jimmy one-of-a-kind is underestimated. the fact that his leadership and downTreybig served as Tandem’s to-earth style make him easy to talk to, CEO and chair until 1996, but all the while, unbeknownst to you, when he and his team sold the the wheels of his computer-like mind company to Compaq, which are constantly spinning. Jimmy has in turn recently merged with been an inspiration to me in helping HP. He proved wildly successme understand, as a technologist, that ful in both starting a new, entechnology is only one important factor trepreneurial company and in running a large enterprise—a in building a great company. It is just rare feat involving such a wide as important to know your customers variety of skills that few are and take good care of them.” able to pull it off. Entrepre—Julie Fergerson neurial companies require viCo-founder of ClearCommerce sion, drive, and the ability to influence people. In large companies, leaders need those qualities as well as the ability to manage and implement process. For his accomplishments, Treybig joins the likes of superstar businessmen Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, and Larry Ellison and has been recognized by Upside magazine as one of “100 People Who Changed Our World” and as a Visionar y Silicon Valley pioneer by Silicon Valley’s Software Development Forum.
Develop Your Skills to Achieve Success
According to Jimmy Treybig, you need about two years in a particular job function to learn 60 to 80 percent of what you need to know about that part of a business. After spending about 10 years in a field—sales, for example— you probably will know about 97 percent of what you need to know, and then you can truly be considered wise in that field. But if your goal is to be a CEO, two years is enough time to spend in one job function—after two years, you should be moving on to another function. Ask someone who knows you, but who is not your best friend, what he or she thinks your strengths and weaknesses are. Your friends will find it difficult to be objective. Then create your skill-development plan accordingly. Spend time talking to someone you admire who is where you want to be. Figure out what his or her skill set is, and find a way to develop those same skills.
Measuring Success When he thinks about success, Treybig is reflective. “There are successful leaders,” he says, “who attract young people, promote them quickly, make money off of them, burn them out, and get rid of them as soon as another young superstar comes along.” He believes there are many companies today whose leaders live by such a philosophy. That kind of success, however, isn’t something he values. “I admire leaders,” he says, “who, in the process of building wealth, try to build an encouraging, enriching, and energetic culture where people can achieve things they never realized they could and, in turn, take what they’ve learned to help their communities and eventually build new businesses that foster the personal growth of more people.” Those who are in business just to make money too often don’t care about people, and that’s where Treybig believes the difference lies between leaders who are just financially successful and those who are successful both financially and in the larger sense of the word. “I don’t feel like I was successful because I made a lot of money, although that’s a nice byproduct,” Treybig reflects. “I feel like I was successful because I changed, in a positive way, the way many people experience their own world.” That holds true for the millions of people who enjoy the conveniences afforded by electronic commerce as well as for the employees who were directly affected by their experience at Tandem and those who currently work with him. Living in Austin, Texas, Treybig now is a venture partner with New Enterprise Associates (NEA), one of the largest venture firms in the world. Prior to joining NEA, he was a venture partner at Austin Ventures. He continues to work with and serve on the boards of several high-tech start-up companies, lending his wisdom to the leaders of the next generation. Two of the companies whose boards he has served on—HelioVolt, provider of solar power thin film for commercial and residential use, and Motion Computing, a developer of Tablet PCs—recently were selected by Ernst & Young as Texas companies with technology that will change the world.
“Jimmy could easily have joined a couple of public company boards after leaving Tandem,” notes Peter Selda, former Tandem employee and former CEO of WholeSecurity, which was sold to Symantec in 2005. “Instead, he works hard at identifying, nurturing, and funding start-ups each year. He always is striving to win while building something lasting.” Selda believes Treybig’s participation as an active board member at WholeSecurity was an integral reason for its success. “I think a lot of people graduating from college or business school just look at how much “If I observe Jimmy’s success, he’s money they can make,” Treybig really good one-on-one and in says. “If I could give any piece of small groups. People at Tandem advice to young people today, it loved Jimmy. When he looked at would be to look at job opportuyou and talked to you, you felt as if nities in terms of what skills they you were the most important person can build. The money will come in the room.” later if they get the skills they need.” It follows that taking the —Yvette del Prado Former vice president of human time to build their own skills enresources at Tandem Computers ables future leaders to see the importance of growing the potential of their employees and helps them to develop into the kind of successful person who has a positive impact on the world. “I don’t want to sound morbid, but in the end, everyone dies, and you won’t be remembered much past your grandkids,” Treybig observes. “So I believe it’s how you initiate or help perpetuate a positive experience for people in your current lifetime that counts. If you can positively affect people by giving them a job and helping them make money to care for family members who pass it on to more people, you end up leaving a lasting and powerful, if often unquantifiable, legacy on the world.”
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By Christopher Dow
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Photography by Tommy LaVergne
It’s just a tiny building, looking like little more than a truncated grain silo, standing alone at the edge of a small parking lot on the north side of campus. But inside it is a window that opens on the universe.
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he window is modest, to be sure, but one that is important to Rice astronomy and astrophysics students. The little silo is the Rice Campus Observatory, and it houses a 16” Meade telescope on a computerized mount. “I call it ‘Rice’s Eye to the Sky,’” says Reginald Dufour, professor of physics and astronomy and chair of the observatory’s faculty guidance committee. Dufour, who has been at Rice since 1975, can remember the many years when students who needed to make real astronomical observations had only a couple of equally daunting options. For simple viewing, the students could check out one of the department’s smaller, portable telescopes ranging from 4” to 11”. The size is the diameter of the light-collecting concave mirror in the base of the telescope. The larger the mirror, the more light is collected, theoretically increasing the sharpness of the image, though actual viewing also depends on the quality of the telescope’s lenses and other factors. “These are very elementary telescopes without computer operation,” Dufour says. “We used to set them up on campus rooftops, like the library, but there was trouble with access and people tripping over things at night, so they don’t want students up there now.” Students also could set up the telescopes in parking lots or playing fields or take them out of the city for the night. But wherever the students took them, there remained three problems: the portable telescopes’ low power, their lack of instrumentation, and the difficulty in setting them up. “Setting up a telescope is such a tedious task because you have to align it properly and do a lot of back-and-forth star observing to get everything set right,” Dufour says. “That could take the students hours.” For more complex viewing than provided by the portable telescopes, students could take the second option of driving to the George Observatory at Brazos Bend State Park, south of Houston, which houses 36”, 20”, and 14” telescopes. The drive made observing an all-night jaunt, and scheduling also could be a problem. The real solution was to have an observatory with a high-quality telescope right here on campus, and while the possibility was discussed for a number of years, nothing happened until Eugene Levy became Rice’s provost in 2000. “Gene was an astronomer and planetary scientist from Arizona,” Dufour says, “and when he came here, he was a little surprised that we didn’t have an observatory with a permanent telescope, given all of the astronomy courses and labs we had.” Fall ’06
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“For the size of our telescope, what we can do here is quite extraordinary.” — Reginald Dufour
Levy offered to fund the construction of the observatory building from his budget if the department could pay for a telescope, mounting, and instrumentation. The prefab building was constructed in 2002 by ObservaDome, and according to Dufour, it’s a heavy, first-quality dome that can withstand hurricane-force winds. The pier for the telescope mounting was poured separately and isolated from the floor to reduce vibration, and the doors for the telescope slit open horizontally instead of vertically, allowing an unimpeded view. “We can observe almost all the way from horizontal to vertical in any direction, limited only by trees and buildings and such,” Dufour says. “The trees behind the dome are on our north axis, and everything goes around the Pole Star in the north, so we rarely observe anything in the north since everything rises in the east and comes down this way. Actually, we can see almost anything that would be possible to see if we were in a flat, treeless area.” While construction of the dome was being planned, professor of physics and astronomy Patricia Reiff contacted all the space physics and astronomy alumni and asked them to donate money to purchase a telescope. “We raised about $15,000,” Dufour says, “and I discovered that a colleague of mine in Oregon had this 16" Meade he was willing to sell for that. It was really a bargain basement telescope at $15,000. To get anything better for the same size telescope would cost about $60,000. So for about a quarter of the price of a normal computerized 16" telescope, we got this one.” The 16" turned out be the perfect size telescope for the campus. “Even though they have a 36" telescope over at the George Observatory,” Dufour says, “the quality of the images on our telescope is far better.” That is due, in part, to the superior optics in the Rice telescope, but interestingly enough,
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it’s also because of the Rice telescope’s smaller diameter. “With our telescope,” Dufour says, “you’re looking through a smaller beam, so the effects of atmospheric turbulence are less.” Turbulence is the primary reason that image quality degrades, refracting the light from an object and causing it to bounce around and create a blurriness of the image. “I was surprised to find that, generally, the seeing that we have is definitely better than at Brazos Bend,” Dufour says, “even with the larger telescope there.” Another oddity that makes for good viewing from the Rice telescope is the fact that Houston is in a heat dome, and there isn’t as much convection from the ground in the summer as there is in the surrounding countryside, further reducing turbulence. “That, apparently, makes for having images in this telescope that are only a few time worse than its theoretical resolving power,” Dufour says. “We do clearer imagery of planets and satellites than normally they can do at the George, and we can use various filters to filter out the light pollution and things like that.” But a telescope, in and of itself, is only as useful as the equipment and instrumentation attached to it. The Meade’s computerized mounting not only allows it to track objects as they traverse the sky, but the operator also can give the computer a time, date, and the coordinates of an object, and the telescope automatically will find it. “The telescope’s internal computer has 65,000 objects in its memory banks, or we can use external programs that have something like 30 million objects,” Dufour says. “In fact, the computer has stars that were mapped with the Hubble Space Telescope, and there have been some times when we would actually use the Space Telescope guide stars to find things to image or take spectra of. While our telescope isn’t big, the equipment we have is first-rate, so we can do things with this little telescope
that, a decade ago, would have required a telescope 10 times this size.” Rice can thank amateur astronomer Tom Williams ’76, who earned his PhD working with Albert van Helden in the history of astronomy, for much of that equipment. “Williams donated $25,000 to the observatory so that we could equip it with various instruments,” Dufour says. “We have really first-rate eyepieces, photometers, imaging systems, filters, spectrographs, and CCD [charged coupling device] cameras specially made for astronomy. With the CCD cameras and special filters, we can read stars that are more than a million times fainter than what you can see with the eye. We found that we can do an amazing amount of research and train students with this telescope to do the same kind of work that they will do in graduate study or at major observatories.” Williams’s funding wasn’t the only impromptu contribution to the new observatory. “We’ve had a couple of really good undergraduates who have helped the facility quite a bit,” Dufour says. “They not only trained other students—and even sometimes professors—to use the telescope, but they also did a number of modifications. One of our astrophysics students, Jayce Dowell [’05], came up with a better control for the dome motor. To move the dome, you used to have to climb down from the viewing platform, go over to the wall, and press a button. Thanks to Jayce, you can now do it from the viewing platform.” The telescope observing time is split between training students in the use of the telescope and its instrumentation and student research projects. “For the size of our telescope, what we can do here is quite extraordinary,” Dufour says. “We might not be able to improve on Hubble’s Constant, but we can show students how to take spectra of galaxies and derive Hubble’s Constant.
Center: Reginald Dufour checks the telescope’s computerized alignment system.
There’s not a lot we can’t do, although we haven’t embarked on any major research projects, yet, simply because there’s a lot of demand for use of the telescope.” The telescope is used by students in about 10 courses, but roughly half its time is divided between two astronomy labs: one for students outside physics and astronomy and one for physics and astronomy majors who
of different types—star-forming nebulae and planetary nebulae, for example—to see if there are differences in the ionization states or composition of the gases.” That kind of training is critical, JohnsKrull says. “It’s extremely important for the 230 lab, where the goal of the class is to teach students how to take and analyze real science-quality data. You can download data
“We’ve had a couple of really good undergraduates who have helped the facility quite a bit,” Dufour says. “They not only trained other students—and even sometimes professors—to use the telescope, but they also did a number of modifications.” — Reginald Dufour
need training in heavy-weight observation and research. “Between those,” Dufour says, “we have our big introductory astronomy classes, with 50 students each semester, and they come to the observatory just to look through the telescope and learn the basics of visual observing through telescopes.” Christopher Johns-Krull, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy, uses the observatory on a regular basis. “The primary class we use it for is Astronomy 230, which is our lab for astronomy and astrophysics majors,” he says. “It’s used to do some general viewing, but it’s also important for class research projects. We have a couple of CCDs and a spectrometer that we attach to it so the students can do imaging and spectroscopy—basically taking science-quality data. A lot of the students look at the planets in our solar system and try to figure out their atmospheric composition. Some students look at stars or galaxies to determine composition or velocities, and some have tried to measure the red-shift of different galaxies, and that sort of thing. Or they might look at nebulae
from the Web or something like that, or make it up, but students don’t learn nearly as much if they don’t have the opportunity to go to a telescope and worry about what’s necessary to take data.” And the inspiration factor is important, too. It’s exciting to students to have such a high-quality facility in their own backyard. “They enjoy it a lot,” Johns-Krull says. “They’re generally very impressed with it. Most of the students who come into Astronomy 230 either have never used a telescope or have never used a telescope larger than 8" in diameter. This one is 16", and it has real instrumentation, which many of them have never seen before.” Students aren’t the only ones excited about the telescope. The observatory hosts an open house about once a month, during the first quarter-moon, which anyone can attend to get a peek at the cosmos. “We usually have 30 to 50 people if we’re not publicizing a special event,” Dufour says. “But we’ve had a couple special events where a whole lot more showed up.” One of those
events was a major opposition of Mars in August 2003, when the red planet was very close to Earth and easy to observe. “Fortunately, we had everything in gear even though the observatory was new and it was the first week of classes,” Dufour says. “We were literally swamped with 600-plus people each night for five nights. The event was carried on several TV stations, and we were just run over by the popularity of the place.” Johns-Krull recalls the reaction of the people who had the opportunity to get a close-up view of Mars. “Most of them had never looked through a telescope before,” he says. “The big telescope was able to show polar caps. Also, one-half of Mars is raised and mountainous, and the other half is more smooth, and they were able to see those sorts of details and were very excited by that.” The observatory was even more popular in October 2004, when it provided views of a Lunar eclipse. “For the first time in the history of Rice, I think,” Dufour chuckles, “all seven TV stations were here, broadcasting the eclipse live.” But the monthly viewings are just as enticing as the special events. “Saturn is always a crowd favorite because of the rings,” JohnsKrull says. “And the Moon is a favorite, too. While most people have seen the Moon many times, it’s just a white ball to them. Through the telescope, they actually can see mountains and valleys and stuff like that. It makes it really look like another world as opposed to just a white ball in the sky.”
The Rice Campus Observatory hosts regular open houses for public viewing and also is available for visits by alumni groups or class reunions. Check www.rice.edu/observatory for schedules and contact information.
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By Jade Boyd and Christopher Dow
The digital age probably has produced more fads in its short life than any other human endeavor in a comparable time span. Remember the dot-com boom—and bust? Remember floppy disks, Zip drives, and miniCDs? And with music downloads now easily available from the Internet, CDs most likely are already on the way out, too. But sometimes a new digital way of doing things escapes the trash heap of obsolescence and actually becomes practical. News distribution, for example, has found active life on the Internet, where stories often break a full day ahead of printed newspaper coverage. Rice’s open-source-based Connexions project is banking that the growing trend toward open-source software and projects will be the next digital success story.
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he idea behind open source, which began with just a few software pioneers like Linux and Apache, is simple and, to a degree, even noble. Open-source software developers essentially relinquish proprietary interest in their code, allowing other software developers the freedom to read, use, redistribute, adapt, and modify it. The premise is that software will become more robust and useful due to the involvement of other interested programmers. But the open-source concept isn’t limited to software code. Information is equally fair game. “Now everyone is jumping on the open-source bandwagon, especially in the area of education,” says Paul Dholakia, associate professor of management at Rice’s Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management. Over the past three years, the number of open-source projects has exploded, encompassing 75,000-plus software sites and hundreds of university offerings, including Connexions. But if users don’t have to pay, what makes opensource endeavors economically sustainable? According to Dholakia’s research, open source offers more revenuegenerating opportunities than organizers can reasonably pursue. With new open-source projects launching daily, Dholakia views sustainability as the key to a project’s success. “Just like with the dot-com explosion, some of the projects will overlap and merge,” he says. “Others will be poorly managed and go bust.” From an idealistic standpoint, Dholakia believes open source has great potential, and he would like to see it established as a permanent resource that continues
to grow. But realistically, he wonders how many opensource developers will properly apply the lessons of business to their projects. “To sustain themselves,” he says, “open-source projects must focus on making their offerings work from a business perspective.” Dholakia points out one mistake common with opensource projects: trying to determine how to make money in the early stages. Too much attention is paid to the site’s features and technology and not enough to understanding the users and potential users and what constitutes value to those people. If the initial focus is on revenue, Dholakia believes, sustainability is being considered the wrong way. “Unless the site is able to first gain and maintain a critical mass of active, engaged users and provide substantial and unique value to them in the start-up and growth phases,” he explains, “it’s unlikely any revenue model will work in the long run.” Using his experiences with Connexions, Dholakia is discovering more answers to the sustainability question. Connexions adapts the open-source software concept to scholarly academic content, allowing anyone to freely publish course materials in a single place online. Connexions is organized around a “content commons,” an online repository that contains thousands of scholarly modules—manuscripts roughly equivalent to two or three pages of a textbook. Connexions provides free software that allows anyone to reuse, revise, and recombine the modules to suit their needs. This feature gives people the option of creating customized courses, custom textbooks, and personalized study guides.
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course, and they’re a little weak in math, so they want to weave in more In a sense, Connexions is an ongoing, large-scale experiment that will fundamental calculus. Connexions allows them to create their own cushelp demonstrate what is needed to effectively create and sustain the tomized version of the course,” Baraniuk explains. “They can do that right conditions for the use of educational and scholarly materials by educators now for free on the Web, and if they want that version in book form, then and learners worldwide. Connexions relies on a value-based segmentation the QOOP deal will allow them to have it delivered to their home within model to help define some of its revenue-generating opportunities—a a matter of days.” model, Dholakia believes, that can be applied to other open-source projThe collaboration with Connexions is an excellent example of how new ects. “While providing open access to all the educational content on site technology solutions can dramatically impact a marketplace, says QOOP to users,” he says, “we can simultaneously provide value-added services to president Phil Wessells. “Textbooks and course guides have grown so prospecific user segments and charge them for those services.” Such services hibitively expensive that systemic change is needed,” he says. “By combinmight be training and user support for institutional users, housing and ing our on-demand production network with Connexions’ course-creation dissemination of copyrighted content within the same site on a subscripsoftware platform, we hope to make textbooks much more affordable for tion basis, ask-an-expert services, or consulting services to provide custom the students.” education to corporate clients. And those students might be anywhere in the world. In Connexions has experienced rapid growth over the past July, for example, Connexions announced an agreement year, both in terms of site visitors and in terms of authorship. with the Vietnam Education Foundation (VEF), Vietnam’s This year, the site has attracted more than 500,000 unique Ministry of Education and Training (MOET), and Vietnam visitors each month. “From its inception, Connexions has Advanced Software Company (VASC) to deploy the Connexused the Web to go beyond print,” says Richard Baraniuk, ions open-source document creation and management system the Victor C. Cameron Professor in Electrical and Computer and content to improve education and research throughout Engineering and founder of Connexions. “It lets pupils and Vietnam. The effort began with a series of training sessions instructors make cross-disciplinary intellectual leaps with a in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. simple mouse click, following knowledge wherever learn“Connexions will provide the tools that Vietnam needs to ing takes them.” turn passive, open-source study materials into active learning But being web-based also is about access. “Our materials resources for both teachers and students,” says Kien Pham, are freely available to everyone,” Baraniuk says, “but we need executive director of VEF, an independent U.S. federal agency an easy, low-cost way to let people use a book if that’s the created by Congress to strengthen relations between Vietnam medium they are most comfortable learning from.” And cost and the United States through educational exchanges in sciis driving other factors. A new 300-page, hardbound engience and technology. Baraniuk concurs. “Our extensible, webneering textbook from a traditional publisher, for example, based technology, open-source licensing, and unique content often sells for $100 to $150. “Today, because of the costs, are a valuable combination for Vietnamese educators, both more and more students are fleeing the market in favor of economically and academically,” he says. “Connexions will used or borrowed books,” Baraniuk says. “Publishers have benefit Vietnam’s students and instructors by allowing them responded to this trend by raising prices, which has only to both create and access materials that are free, constantly created a downward spiral.” He notes that, for students, the updated, and presented in a unique manner that engages downside to the increased use of used books is that some students in ways that printed books cannot.” technical fields are advancing so rapidly that used books Under the agreement, MOET will coordinate and promote “We’re going often are seriously out of date, and students leave the class the use of Connexions at universities and institutions of higher unprepared for what awaits them in the job market. to give learning throughout Vietnam. VASC, one of Vietnam’s leadIn an effort to combine the best of web-based learning and ing software, Internet, and media companies and owner of the preference of some students for printed texts, Connexions students the open-source education portal Vietnam Open Courseware has forged a print-on-demand agreement with Californiaaccess to the (VOCW), will act as technical collaborator and incorporate based QOOP Inc. that will allow students and instructors the use of Connexions’ tools on the VOCW portal. Conanywhere in the world to order high-quality, hardbound latest, up-tonexions will provide regular software updates and technical textbooks from Connexions at greatly reduced prices. “Our advice and support to MOET and VASC, including training combination of open content and print-on-demand technology date material, assistance. VEF will act as catalyst and facilitator, working will change the paradigm, both economically and academiand we’re closely with each of the partners to coordinate and promote cally,” Baraniuk says. “We’re going to give students access the use of Connexions in Vietnam. to the latest, up-to-date material, and we’re going to do it going to do it “Our technology makes it easy to both create content in at used-book prices.” The price of a hardbound Connexions Vietnamese and translate existing Connexions content into textbook—only $15 to $20—includes not only costs and at used-book Vietnamese,” Baraniuk says. And Vietnamese is just the latest profit for the on-demand press but also a small sustainability prices.” addition to the Connexions linguistic portfolio. “This ease of revenue stream that funds the Connexions project, as well translation,” Baraniuk says, “is one reason instructors around as a revenue stream that will enable students in developing —Richard Baraniuk the globe already are using our content in Spanish, Chinese, countries to get the print-on-demand version of the book Thai, Japanese, Italian, and other languages.” for free. Standard paperbacks will take just three to five days In its relatively young life, the Internet has promised to produce and ship, while hardbacks will take about a week. many boons, and though some have gone bust, perhaps QOOP ships directly to customers. the greatest—expansion of knowledge into every corner of the world—is The deal with QOOP positions Connexions to take the lead in opensteadily making inroads thanks to projects like Connexions. Dholakia puts source textbook publishing, and Connexions plans to offer more than it succinctly when he says, “Delivering quality educational material to those 100 titles for online purchase by year’s end. No other publisher of openwho otherwise would be unable to afford it is just one way open-source source educational content can match those offerings. This is partly due projects can do good in the world.” to Connexions’ early adoption of licenses developed by the nonprofit Connexions is funded primarily by Rice University and the William organization Creative Commons (creativecommons.org). These licenses and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which has contributed $2.25 million to provide a flexible range of protections for authors and freedoms for users. the program. Because all content on the site is authored under these licenses, there are no copyright conflicts to negotiate. QOOP’s on-demand service will allow Connexions users to order customized course guides and a variety of fully developed Connexions textVisit Connexions at www.cnx.org. books. Moreover, each student will be able to use Connexions to build their own customized textbook. “Let’s say a student is in an engineering
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Rice University Press Reinvents Itself as Digital Academic Press As money-strapped university presses shut down nationwide, Rice University is turning to technology to bring its press back to life as the first fully digital university press in the United States. Using the open-source epublishing platform Connexions, Rice University Press is returning from a decade-long hiatus to explore models of peer-reviewed scholarship for the 21st century. The technology offers authors a way to use multimedia—audio files, live hyperlinks, or moving images—to craft dynamic scholarly arguments and to publish on-demand original works in fields of study that are increasingly constrained by print publishing. “Our decision to revive Rice’s press as a digital enterprise is based on both economics and on new ways of thinking about scholarly publishing,” explains Chuck Henry, vice provost, university librarian, and publisher of Rice University Press during its start-up phase. “University presses are losing money at unprecedented rates, and technology offers us ways to decrease production costs and provide a nearly ubiquitous delivery system—the Internet. We avoid costs associated with backlogs, large inventories, and unsold physical volumes, and we greatly speed the editorial process. We don’t have precise figures for our start-up costs yet, but it’s safe to say the start-up costs and annual operating expenses will be one-tenth of what we’d expect to pay if we were using a traditional publishing model.” The digital press will operate just as traditional presses do—up to a point. Manuscripts will be solicited, reviewed, edited, and resubmitted for final approval by an editorial board of prominent scholars. But rather than waiting months for a
printer to make a bound book, Rice University Press’s digital files will be run through Connexions for automatic formatting, indexing, and population with high-resolution images, audio, video, and web links. “We don’t print anything,” Henry explains. “It will go online as a Rice University Press publication in a matter of days and be available for sale as a digital book.” Users will be able to view the content online for free or purchase a copy of the book for download through the Rice University Press website. Alternatively, thanks to the Connexions partnership with on-demand printer QOOP Inc., users will be able to order printed books if they want, in every style from softbound black-and-white on inexpensive paper to leather-bound full-color hardbacks on high-gloss paper. “As with a traditional press, our publications will be peer-reviewed, professionally vetted, and very high quality,” Henry says. “But the choice to have a printed copy will be up to the customer.” Authors published by Rice University Press will retain the copyrights for their works, in accordance with the Connexions licensing agreement with Creative Commons. Additionally, because Connexions is open source, authors will be able to update or amend their work, easily creating a revised edition of their book. In the coming months, Rice University Press will name its board of directors and appoint an editorial board in one or two academic disciplines that are especially constrained by the current print model. One such field is art history, in which printing costs are exceptionally high. Over the years, many university presses have slashed the number of art history titles they print, severely limiting younger scholars’ prospects of publication, so it is a field
that would benefit immediately, and therefore it will be the press’s initial area of major effort. The press also will foster new models of scholarship. With the rise of digital environments, scholars are increasingly attempting to write booklength studies that use new media—images, video, audio, and Web links—as part of their arguments. Because of its digital nature, Rice University Press will easily accommodate these new forms of scholarship. Another area of endeavor will be to provide more affordable publishing for scholarly societies and centers. Often, disciplinary societies and smaller centers, especially in the humanities, publish annual reports, reflections on their field of study, or original research resulting from grants. For smaller organizations, the printing costs of these publications are prohibitive. Rice University Press will partner with organizations to provide more affordable publishing. A second partnering effort will be with large university presses. In the wake of rising production costs and overhead, many university presses have closed or reduced the number of titles they publish, especially in the humanities and social sciences. As a result, many peer-reviewed, highquality books are waiting on backlog. Rice University Press will work with selected university publishers to inexpensively publish approved works. Two major university presses already have expressed interest in working with Rice to reduce backlogged titles. Rice University Press plans to join with these and other presses to produce such works as dual publications. —Jennifer Evans
Fall ’06
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Beginning this fall, the Rice Theatre Program takes a dramatic turn with its merger with visual arts in the newly named Department of Visual and Dramatic Arts. The move is an obvious one, according to Karin Broker, professor of visual arts and chair of the department. “Artists typically embrace fellow artists who explore, who create, and who, at their core, are basically fearless,” Broker says. “The Department of Visual Arts was quick to realize that the Theatre Program would benefit our visual art students. If a program could better educate our young artists to be more creative and ‘see’ better or ‘see’ differently, then we have a responsibility to make it happen.” For the time being, the merged department will no longer offer a five-year bachelor of fine arts degree but instead a four-year bachelor’s, with plans to augment that at some time in the future by a master of fine arts degree. Under the bachelor’s program, students can choose a track in studio arts—painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, photography, or digital video and film production—or a track in theatre. The theatre track offers a solid foundation in all aspects of theatrical production—from acting and directing to technology and design—for students who wish to pursue a professional career in theatre or continue on to a graduate program. The theatre courses also are open to nonmajors who want to gain a greater appreciation for the art
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of theatre. The former Department of Visual Arts already mounted several art and photography exhibitions annually in addition to a graduating senior art exhibit at the Rice Gallery, and these will continue. Also ongoing will be the department’s partnership with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Glassell School of Art in which up to six postgraduate artists and art educators from the Glassell Core Fellowship Residency Program
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holds in the arts and in everyone’s life.” Rice theatre faculty are involved in professional theatre and film locally, nationally, and internationally and actively pursue opportunities to involve advanced students in that work. Rice students have been accepted into competitive internships at the Alley Theatre, the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the Williamstown Theatre Festival, and the Peter Hall Company, and students are encouraged to study theatre abroad. Each year, the department will produce two main-stage productions and two end-ofsemester student showcases in
“This merger is a significant step toward meeting the university’s mission statement to provide unsurpassed undergraduate education in the arts.” —Trish Rigdon
teach studio practice and critical theory to Rice students. The Theatre Program will significantly augment the new department’s offerings, says program director Trish Rigdon. “This merger is a significant step toward meeting the university’s mission statement to provide unsurpassed undergraduate education in the arts,” Rigdon says. “The desire to express stories and to understand what it means to be human through theatrical performance is an ancient inheritance, and theatre is one of the foundations of culture. The merger recognizes the important place that theatre
Hamman Hall’s 500-seat proscenium theatre. In even-number years, the Theatre Program will continue to host the Actors from the London Stage, one of the oldest established touring Shakespeare theatre companies in the world, for a weeklong residency of workshops, performances, and lectures. Each tour, sponsored by the Alan and Shirley Grob Endowment for Shakespeare in Performance, presents a full-length play by Shakespeare performed by five classically trained actors from such prestigious companies as the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal National Theatre
of Great Britain, and Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. The Rice Media Center and the 35-year-old Rice Cinema also are parts of the merged department. A public alternative film program, Rice Cinema offers an alternative to the monolithic commercial cinema of Hollywood by exhibiting alternative cinema and media as well as films from around the world and by presenting guest lecturers and panel discussions on film and media. “Members of Houston’s hip elite often have told me about the exciting early days of Rice theater and cinema,” says Brian Huberman, associate professor of visual arts and assistant to the department chair. “Great days when Sandy Havens’s Rice Players performed Marat Sade to sold-out audiences and when the late Academy Award-nominated filmmaker James Blue electrified cinemagoers and students with programs of regional film at the Rice Media Center. Healthy theater and cinema programs speak to the general health and well-being of the community they represent.” Through the Rice Media Center facilities, students have access to state-of-the-art screening facilities to examine and study the historical and methodological aspects of movies in 16, 35, and 70 millimeter with Dolby Digital Sound. Film production students showcase their work during the year in the Rice Cinema theater. —Christopher Dow
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“New classical music” may sound like an oxymoron, but Rice’s Syzygy concert series has spent 30 years promoting just that: classical music written by living composers. “Our motto is, ‘If the ink is dry, we shouldn’t play it,’” Shepherd School of Music’s Art Gottschalk says with a laugh. The series was introduced in April 1976 with a single concert. It quickly grew to two concerts per year, then to six, and today, Syzygy is considered a leading source in Houston for cutting-edge, new music. Gottschalk, professor of composition and theory who joined the Shepherd School faculty in 1975, explains that the concert series got its name from the dual meaning of the word syzygy. In astronomy, it means an alignment of the planets, but in poetry, syzygy refers to the use of meters in opposition to each other. “We liked the ying and yang of its meanings,” he says, recalling that the founders of Syzygy deemed it fitting for a concert series of new classical music. Usually the concert series features music that was written within the previous year or two, notes Shi-Hui Chen, assistant professor of composition and chair of the Syzygy committee, but this year’s 30th anniversary series has a slightly more “mature” focus. The anniversary series is honoring the heritage of the Shepherd School by featuring the works of two of its founding members. One of those founders was Paul Cooper, a prolific composer who died in 1996. His composition Requiem, written in 1978, will be performed on March 28, 2007, by Shepherd School faculty members Clyde Holloway and Richard Brown. Another of his compositions, Verses, written in 1991, was performed in October by the Patterson Duo, guest artists of the Shepherd School. The Patterson Duo also performed Entre Nous, a composition written in 1988 by Ellsworth Milburn, who retired from the Shepherd School in 1998. But the new-music series isn’t forgetting its roots. In fact, the March 28 concert that will feature Cooper’s work also will serve as the Southwest United States premier of a new work, Synchronism No. 12, by Mario Davidosky. Rice is one of 10 U.S. universities that have joined together to commission the new work for bass clarinet and electronic sounds from Davidosky,
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a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer. He is composing the new piece while in residence at Rice during fall 2006, and his residency will feature discussions with students about the compositional process. The work will premier nationally at the spring 2007 conference of the Society of Electro–Acoustic Music in the United States. Other new music that will be performed at the series includes work for symphonic band, which is unusual because the Shepherd School does not have a symphonic band. Members of the faculty, as well as student performers, were assembled for the band, which will perform A Parliament of Owls, written by Sam Jones, composerin-residence with the Seattle Symphony at the March 28 Syzygy concert. The Syzygy concert series is important, Gottschalk notes, not just for the exposure it gives to new music but also because of the learning opportunities for Rice students. “New music is the hardest to play because no one is really familiar with it,” Gottschalk says, “so the concert series is a great learning experience for our students.” Not only do students—who, along with faculty, are the primary Syzygy performers—learn first-hand the challenge of playing new music, but students in the composition program at the Shepherd School also benefit greatly from hearing the new works of their instructors. Another benefit is that the series also is used as a venue to invite musicians to Rice as guest performers and professors, and they often have significant interaction with students. Over the years, the series has featured some “incredible” music, Gottschalk says, including some that has become widely known and played, like Bolero by Ravel. Yet it’s often hard to attract audiences to new-music concerts, admit Gottschalk and Chen, because most of the time nobody ever has heard the music before. But, Gottschalk points out, 17th century audiences had never heard Beethoven’s compositions either. “It’s only been in the 20th century market and industry of music,” he says, “that the audience has come to believe that classical music is defined as that written by dead white Europeans.”
A Mouthful and an Earful
—Dana Benson
Fall ’06
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The Providence String Quartet, left to right: Sara Stalnaker, Jessie Montgomery, Sebastian Ruth, Jesse Holstein
Making a Difference in the World through Music After graduating in spring 2001, cellist Sara Stalnaker packed her car and headed east from her birthplace of Portland, Oregon, not quite sure where she was going or what she would do when she arrived. She’d just graduated from the Shepherd School of Music, and she wondered where her career in music might take her. The pondering took a pause when she reached Connecticut and got in touch with an old Rice friend, Heath Marlow, another cellist who’d graduated two years earlier. Heath invited her to visit him in Providence, Rhode Island, where he’d been teaching cello to children from impoverished inner-city neighborhoods as part of a group called Community MusicWorks (CMW). In a twist of good fortune for Stalnaker, Marlow was leaving CMW for a job on the West Coast, and he suggested she would be a good fit to fill his position with the organization. “I couldn’t have imagined the depth and intensity of this program until the day I traveled to the neighborhood for my interview,” Stalnaker says. “The cracked cement and treeless streets, the kids’ incredible energy and charm, the violin cases they carried around like secret treasure chests, the quiet inspiration of founder and director Sebastian Ruth—I was beyond captivated.” Stalnaker got the job, and now, five years later, she plays cello in Community MusicWorks’s resident quartet—the Providence String Quartet—and teaches and mentors cello students from the neighborhood. She also runs the musical workshop series and teen group and facilitates the family concert outings. Marlow’s association with the project goes back even before its inception. He
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first met CMW founder Sebastian Ruth, then a student at Brown University, when they participated in an idealistic orchestra in the New York area. After Marlow graduated from Rice, Ruth invited him to visit Providence. Ruth wanted to talk to Marlow about an urban string quartet residency he was in the process of developing after winning a public service fellowship from the Howard R. Swearer Center for Public Service at Brown. Ruth, who serves as CMW’s executive artistic director and violinist with the Providence String Quartet, started the project out of a desire to perform chamber music professionally while simultaneously having significant involvement in social change. “Situating a quartet in the heart of a community,” he says, “was an experiment to see how musicians could incorporate themselves meaningfully into the daily lives of children and their families.” After only one visit, Marlow was hooked. “Starting in September 1999,”
Photograph by Sandor Bodo
he says, “I drove down to Providence from Boston one day a week to serve as CMW’s first cello teacher and resident musician for two seasons, and I’ve continued my association with CMW ever since.” Despite the fact that Marlow had gone to work in Oakland, California, in 2001, his interest in CMW refused to wane. He began telecommuting in a development role and, after four years, returned to the organization as director of development and artistic program administrator. As the organization grows, Marlow finds himself more and more in an indirect service role. “We now have a team of volunteer musical mentors,” he explains, “who fill in as practice coaches or substitute teachers.” Even so, he still makes time to teach and perform. “I coached a string quartet of teens last season and performed
radar for major music conservatories. “Public service is not a core part of the curriculum,” he says, “and that’s where Sebastian’s idealism caught me off guard. Couldn’t it be possible for a musician’s role in the community to be bigger than appearing on stage by night and disappearing into the practice studio by day? What would it be like if professional musicians felt like their work was a necessary . . . no, essential daily part of the fabric of society? We’d like to expand music schools’ thinking on what it means to be a professional musician in society to include urban residencies such as ours.” Chloë Kline ’98, who plays the viola, is another Shepherd School alum involved in CMW. She joined the organization this fall as a fellow, and she’ll teach violin and viola and perform with CMW musicians. “I have been peripherally involved as an observer and friend of
Schubert’s Quintet in C Major with the Providence String Quartet. Next spring, I’ll join them again for a performance of Tchaikovsky’s tuneful string sextet, Souvenir de Florence.” Marlow says CMW is a unique musical model that hasn’t been on the
CMW for several years,” says Kline, who wrote several research papers on CMW for a master’s degree in arts in education at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. During her research, Kline talked indepth with a number of students about
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their experiences with CMW and how these experiences fit into their broader support networks. Now, she hopes to experience firsthand the work at CMW and to understand what parts of the group’s model might provide useful lessons for other community-based music education programs. Ruth deeply appreciates the efforts and expertise the Shepherd School alums bring to CMW. “Both Heath and Sara are not only phenomenal cellists but also keenly interested in pursuing meaningful careers outside the mainstream,” he says. “I really respect their willingness to take a risk and apply their talents to this experimental project. It has helped them fulfill their ambitions to make a difference in the world through music.” Stalnaker, Ruth says, is a true mentor to her students, constantly keeping track of the events and constraints in their lives. “One great example of her thorough approach,” he relates, “was when, last year, she identified that the obstacle to one of her students’ practicing was the chaos of his home life—there wasn’t a quiet place in the house to practice his cello. Sara bought him a rug, chair, lamp, and music stand and set up a practice corner in the family’s basement. It was such a success that his four siblings, who also are in the program, practice there, too.” Marlow’s efforts have been more systemic. “He makes important connections with musicians all over the country and established our Artistic Advisory Council, which is composed of musicians who support CMW’s growth,” Ruth says. “He’s set up concerts for chamber music groups to visit Providence and perform with our quartet, and his connections from Rice and music festivals no
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from student to student, though she is closest to the girls. “Some of the girls and I text message often, go out for hot chocolate, and have sleepovers at my lake house. I build most of my relationships with the boys through friendships with their mothers. I find this is the best way to support them.” Stalnaker says her Shepherd School cello professor, Norman Fischer, was a true inspiration. “His students are walking proof that great mentoring and inspirational teaching are equally essential ingredients to creating success,” she says, adding that he also encouraged her to look beyond the more obvious careers in music. Marlow cites Fischer as an influence, too, as well Brian Connelly, an artist teacher of piano and piano chamber music and accompanying, both of whom gave him a sophisticated appreciation of chamber music. He also says that Larry Rachleff, the Walter Kris Hubert Professor of Orchestral Conducting, provided “great orchestral training.” “One of the unique characteristics of the Shepherd School is its prioritization on community,” Fischer says. “We work hard at creating a supportive, noncompetitive environment for learning that builds strong working relationships between students, faculty, and staff. A program like CMW is a natural outgrowth of those kinds of relationships. In addition, we strongly encourage our students to take the initiative to create a life for themselves that reflects their own values.” Fischer isn’t surprised that the three Shepherd School alums are involved in CMW. “I first heard Heath when he was 15 years old at a master class I gave at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge,” he recalls. “His talent and intelligence were immediately evident and continued to impress me
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School were very memorable. She has both a softness and a great determination that are a marvelous combination in a musician. I feel she has found an ideal outlet for her particular gifts as a player and teacher with Community MusicWorks. “Chloe is a quiet, deep-thinking artist who draws you into her realm when she plays. I’ve always enjoyed working with her and listening to her personal voice when she performs.” The benefits CMW brings to the students, the community it serves, and the staff members themselves are compelling. “Caring, positive relationships support general wellbeing, and well-being is the font from which imagination, motivation, and leadership spring,” Stalnaker says. “These qualities are what makes our community as strong as it is today.” Kline also thinks that one of the most impressive aspects of the program is its focus on building community through music. “These students are not just learning basic skills on their instruments,” she says. “They are learning ways in which these skills can broaden their perceptions of what is possible as individuals and as members of a wider community.” Plans for a formal assessment of the program are under way, Marlow says, but anecdotal evidence, including accolades such as the award from the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, attests to the benefits of CMS’s presence in Providence. In addition, Chamber Music America, the industry’s service organization, recently awarded the organization a three-year grant to help it deepen its impact on the community. On a personal level, Marlow feels grateful for being part of “such a
through CMW’s storefront windows then four people rehearsing music together, intently facing each other and learning to communicate effectively, all for the sake of creating a cohesive and meaningful product to share with others. That image certainly can be extended to other areas of civic life. I look to CMW to set a precedent for how music and musicians can not only bring music to the stage but help provide significant social capital for a community.” Stalnaker says there isn’t a single experience that best illustrates the benefits of the program. Instead, it’s the ongoing experience. “Watching my students perform,” she says, “and seeing not just the focus and determination on their faces but their ensuing relief and pride at the applause—that’s about as good as it gets.” Some of her favorite recollections are dropping a fairly new student off after a workshop only to have the student ask, “Do you want to hang out tomorrow?”; being tutored on the current top-40 radio hits during a trip out of town for a hike; and talking with teens about violence in their schools. “I’ve seen some amazing things in recent years,” Marlow agrees. One was a “Youth Salon” the teens initiated as a benefit for Hurricane Katrina victims, but he also remembers one tough young lady with plenty of attitude. “She was one of the cellists I began teaching in 1999, and she was still with the program last year,” Marlow says. “She’s not really into the cello, but she clearly loves being around the Providence String Quartet and being part of the string quartet I coached.” When Marlow last saw her, she told him she was planning to apply to college. “She’s a great kid growing up in tough circumstances, and she’s got a
Community meetings, open rehearsals, classes, and smiling faces are all parts of Community MusicWorks.
doubt contribute to his being able to do this.” Bringing classical music to children from impoverished inner-city neighborhoods isn’t always easy. Stalnaker says her involvement with the kids varies
as he went through his curriculum at Rice. The entrepreneurial spirit really resonated with him. “Sara is a very creative performer and one who has great vulnerability as an artist. Her recitals at the Shepherd
beautiful idea.” “For me,” he says, “music is ultimately a social act, one of connection. That’s why I’ve always loved chamber music and string quartets especially. As a model for a strong community, what better thing to see
hardened exterior,” Marlow says, “but I think we’ve helped her feel like she has a support system—people who care about her and want her to do well. I think she will do well.” —Christopher Dow
Fall ’06
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Want to know the facts about global climate change? Don’t listen to the pundits on television or search online for the endless and often uninformed blogs on the subject. Instead, pick up a book by an expert, such as The Rough Guide to Climate Change (Rough Guides, 2006), by Robert Henson ’81.
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appily for the reader, Henson is both a meteorologist and a journalist. He works for the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, which manages the National Center for Atmospheric Research. There, he writes and edits publications on weather and weather research and participates in research projects. He also is the author of The Rough Guide to Weather (Rough Guides, 2002), a fine compendium of information on weather and its patterns. In his new book, Henson concentrates not on weather specifics but on general climactic patterns and how and why they are changing. Although the author recognizes global climate
change as an established fact, the book eschews the combative writing style of many writers on the subject, taking instead a balanced and highly informed approach. His purpose may be to convince, but his method is to present facts and let those facts illuminate his arguments. The first fact he mentions is that the Earth has, indeed, warmed by close to 0.8°C
Climate change could kill more than a third of the world’s plant and animal species by 2050. The golden toad was an early casualty.
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(1.4°F) in the last century. “In recent years,” he writes, “global temperatures have spiked dramatically, reaching a new high in 1998. An intense El Niño early that year clearly played a role in the astounding warmth, but things haven’t exactly chilled down since then. The first five years of the twenty-first century, along with 1998, were the hottest on record—and quite possibly warmer than any others in the past millennium.” The reasons for the increasing warmth are complex, and Henson does them justice by examining potential natural as well as human causes and the ways natural elements, such as rainforests and volcanic eruptions, affect climate and the weather patterns that result from climate change. Many of the outcomes of a warming climate are well
known: extreme heat, violent weather, flooding and drought, and melting polar ice and rising sea levels, but Henson also explores the effects on ecosystems and agriculture and on the quality of human habitats. The book is well organized, beginning, in part one, with a primer on the basic mechanisms of global climate and the ways in which they, and other factors, interact to cause climate change. Part two functions somewhat like the forensic evidence presented during a court case, providing an in-depth look at how climate change already is affecting life on Earth. Part three delves into the science that has enabled researchers to gauge climate change and puts current discoveries and theories into historical context. The fourth part—easily one of the
most topical—examines the debates surrounding the issue and discusses possible solutions that might, if not eliminate the threats posed by global climate change, then at least reduce them. The final section presents a list of other sources on the subject, such as books and websites. Interesting and well written, The Rough Guide to Climate Change should easily hold the attention of anyone curious or concerned about this important topic. —Christopher Dow
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The Evidence
B oo k n otes
When navy pilot John Wells enters astronaut training school, little does he realize that his calling toward the stars will lead him to Mars to thwart an alien invasion. Or that he will face so many challenges to his devout faith.
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What do a toad, a yak, an octopus, and a firefly have in common? They, and a couple of dozen other critters, are the subjects of a short collection of children’s poems titled Animal Mischief (Boyds Mills Press, 2006), by Rob Jackson ’83.
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ackson’s verses are quirky fun, but they’re informative as well. The author is a professor in Duke University’s Department of Biology and director of Duke’s Global Change Center, and he strews the poems with odd yet intriguing tidbits, such as the fact that nine-banded armadillos always produce litters of four, either all male or all female, or that an ant, after finding food, drags its stinger on the ground to lay a trail of scent for other ants to follow. Jackson winds up the book with several pages of background information for young readers about the various subjects of his poems. The poems are accompanied by appropriately amusing illustrations by Laura Jacobson. —Christopher Dow
ells, the protagonist of The Evidence (NavPress, 2006), book one in the Mars Hill Classified series, is on his first flight aboard the International Space Station when a massive terrorist attack takes out much of the U.S. military’s infrastructure as well as the command center for NASA. The terrorists aren’t, however, foreign-born nationals but homegrown renegades led by a dangerous ex-air force officer named Nick. Nick seems to be in it for the money, but who are the puppet masters pulling his strings? All evidence points to mysterious signals emanating from the Red Planet. While special agent Terrance Kerry tracks the terrorists, Wells comes home, only to find himself in command of a mission to Mars to learn the truth. A former navy pilot, astronaut finalist, and space systems engineer, author Austin Boyd ’77 knows the technical ins and outs well enough to ground The Evidence in solid science and engineering. What is more unusual is to see a near-future, high-tech thriller laced with profound Christian sentiment. Although this may seem at odds with the science-fiction aspects of the story, Boyd doesn’t see it that way. “Christian fiction writing lacks the technological and edgy real-life situations that are showing up in mainstream writing,” he says. “We need to deal with those issues in a novel environment. We should be writing fiction that shares truth, which is what Jesus did with his parables.” Book two of the Mars Hill Classified series, The Proof, hit stores in September, and book three, The Return, will be released in June 2007. —Christopher Dow
Caribbean–South American Plate Interactions, Venezuela, by Hans Avé Lallemant, professor emeritus of earth science at Rice (Geological Society of America, 2005) The Chef Who Died Sautéing, by Honora Moore Finkelstein ’63 and Susan Smily (Hilliard and Harris, 2006) Death Dines In, edited by Dean James ’86 and Claudia Bishop (Penguin, 2005) Decorated to Death: A Simon Kirby-Jones Mystery, by Dean James ’86 (Kensington Publishing, 2005) Environmental Science Demystified, by Linda Williams, technical writer at the Wiess School of Natural Sciences at Rice (McGraw Hill, 2005) Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India, by George H. Gilpin ’67, professor of English at the University of Tulsa, and Hermione de Almeida (Ashgate, 2006) Korean American Evangelicalism: New Models of Civic Life, by Elaine Howard Ecklund, a postdoctoral fellow in sociology at Rice (Oxford University Press, 2006) The Life and Legend of Gerbert of Aurillac: the Organbuilder Who Became Pope Sylvester II, by Anna Marie Flusche ’95 (Edwin Mellen, 2006) Marque and Reprisal, by Elizabeth Moon ’68 (Del Rey, 2004) The McCartys of the Northern Neck: 350 Years of a Virginia Family, by Kathleen Much ’63 and W. M. McCarty (Gateway, 2005) Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa, edited by Ussama Makdisi, the Arab American Educational Foundation Associate Professor of History at Rice, and Paul A. Silverstein (Indiana University Press, 2006) The Robert B. Parker Companion, by Dean James ’86 and Elizabeth Foxwell (Berkley Trade, 2005) Thomas Dixon Jr. and the Birth of Modern America, edited by Michele K. Gillespie ’83, associate professor of history at Wake Forest University, and Randal L. Hall ’97, managing editor of the Journal of Southern History at Rice (LSU Press, 2006) Tolkien’s Modern Middle Ages, edited by Jane Chance, professor of English at Rice, and Alfred Siewers (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) Tracking Truth: Knowledge, Evidence, and Science, by Sherrilyn Roush, assistant professor of philosophy at Rice (Oxford University Press, 2006) Where Men Are Wives and Mothers Rule: Santeria Ritual Practices and Their Gender Implications, by Mary Ann Clark ’99 (University Press of Florida, 2005)
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Chris Muñoz, who became Rice’s new vice president for enrollment in July, increased the applicant pool at Case Western Reserve University by 50 percent in two years and oversaw a 30 percent increase in class size while serving as vice provost for enrollment there. Very precise market research helped him rack up such impressive numbers, and that strategy should also benefit Rice’s plans to expand its undergraduate enrollment by 30 percent over the next decade. “We need to figure out where the best markets are to achieve that goal,” Muñoz says. “That includes finding out what is appealing about Rice to students who live in those areas and then creating the perfect knowledge to methodically make those appeals well-known to those students.” “The perfect knowledge” is critical,” Muñoz says. “It’s one thing for Rice to have wonderful values,” he explains. “But if prospective students and their parents in other geographical locations don’t recognize them, those positive values will not be influential in increasing the size of the applicant pool and being able to manage the profile of the entering class.” Direct marketing is the key to any successful marketing plan, Muñoz says, and he’s in favor of using everything from predictive modeling to geodemography to better understand how students view the college
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selection process in general and Rice University specifically. “It’s important to be on the bleeding edge of the use of technology, ecommunication, and websites and to use the intelligence that can be gathered by these approaches for our market segmentation strategies,” he says, acknowl-
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University of Dayton and California Lutheran University. He also was director of admissions and school relations at Humboldt State University, assistant director of admissions and financial aid at the University of Oregon, and assistant director of financial aid at the University of California at Irvine. A nationally known speaker on strategic enrollment planning, admissions, and financial aid, Muñoz serves on an advisory committee to U.S. News & World Report, sharing insight about challenges in
“It’s one thing for Rice to have wonderful values, but if prospective students and their parents in other geographical locations don’t recognize them, those positive values will not be influential in increasing the size of the applicant pool and being able to manage the profile of the entering class.” —Chris Muñoz
edging the value of surrounding himself with people who are “talented, dedicated, and have skills that are better than mine.” At Rice, Muñoz will oversee the offices of admission, enrollment operations, and student financial services—all areas that relate to his professional background. In addition to his leadership position at Case, he has been vice president for enrollment management at both the
higher education, admissions, and student recruitment that might be useful for the magazine’s annual ranking of colleges and universities. He has helped the College Board test its enrollment planning service and has chaired the Commission on Student Recruitment and Retention for the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. Reflecting on significant changes in the college admis-
sions process over the past three decades, what surprises Muñoz most is universities’ increased awareness of historically underrepresented students and their desire to track and enroll those students. “When I went to college, I was probably one of the few Mexican Americans going to the state university in Southern California,” says Muñoz, who has a bachelor’s degree in theater arts from California State University at Fullerton and a master of science in counseling from the University of Oregon. “Over the years, so many universities have noted the growing number of students who historically have not graduated from high school or gone on to college, and they have decided that trend is something that needs to be reversed, not just because it would be good for our community, society, country, and economy, but because it is the right thing to do.” Rice is doing “pretty well” in this regard relative to other universities, Muñoz notes, saying, “That was one of the factors that was appealing to me about Rice.” Muñoz succeeds Ann Wright, who left Rice last year. —B. J. Almond
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New Trustees Added to Rice Board Robert L. Clarke, Robert B. Tudor III, and Robert R. Maxfield have more than just their first names in common: All are alumni of Rice University, and all were named to the Rice Board of Trustees for a four-year term that began July 1. Clarke, who was raised in Hobbs, New Mexico, graduated from Rice in 1963 with a bachelor’s degree in economics. He received a bachelor of laws from Harvard in 1966. While at Rice, Clarke served as an officer of Hanszen College and as Student Association president. A member of the Thresher staff, the Honor Council, and the Army ROTC, Clarke was named an Outstanding Senior and a Distinguished Military Student. He received the Cameron Service Award, and in 1992 he was honored as a Distinguished Alumnus of Rice. He joined Bracewell & Giuliani LLP, where his principal areas of practice include assisting banks in the United States and abroad in matters involving state and federal banking laws, regulations and supervisory agencies, mergers and acquisitions of financial institutions, strategic planning, independent counsel to boards of directors, new financial services products, management of regulatory risk, and litigation support as an expert witness. President Ronald Reagan appointed Clarke as U.S. comptroller of the currency—a
position to which he was reappointed by President George H. W. Bush. The banks supervised by this office account for about two-thirds of the assets of the commercial banking system. When Clarke’s appointment as comptroller ended, he rejoined Bracewell & Giuliani in 1991 as senior partner and head of the firm’s financial services practice. Clarke received the Distinguished Service Award from the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury in 1992 and the Banking Leadership Award from the Western States School of Banking in 1993. Alexandria, Louisiana, native Tudor graduated from Rice in 1982 with a bachelor of arts in English and legal studies. He received a doctor of jurisprudence from Tulane Law School in 1987. While at Rice, Tudor was an officer of Hanszen College and student representative on the University Committee on Examinations and Standing. He lettered in basketball and received the Bob Quin Award for being the male senior athlete who most exemplified distinction in athletics, academics, and leadership.
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Robert B. Tudor III
Before attending graduate school, Tudor spent two years as a professional basketball player with Turnerschaft Raifeisen in Innsbruck, Austria, where he also had a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship. Tudor joined Goldman, Sachs and Co. in 1987 in the Investment Banking Division in New York. He became a managing director in 1996 and was named a partner in 1998. After five years in London, where he headed the Industrial and Natural Resources Group, Tudor returned to Houston in 2005 as a managing director in the Investment Banking Division. Houston mayor Bill White appointed Tudor to the Houston Library Board of Directors to complete an unexpired term that ends March 1, 2007. Tudor served as president of the “R” Association’s Board of Directors at Rice last year and on the Association of Rice Alumni Board of Directors. Maxfield was renamed to the Rice Board of Trustees after taking a year off in compliance with the limitation on two consecutive four-year terms. Raised in Wichita Falls, Texas, Maxfield graduated from Rice with a bachelor of arts, magna cum laude, in 1963, and a bachelor of science in electrical engineering in 1964. He also received a master’s and a doctoral degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1966 and 1969, respectively. While a student at Rice, Max-
Robert R. Maxfield
field was a resident of Hanszen College and lettered in varsity swimming. His honor society memberships included Phi Beta Kappa, Tau Beta Pi, and Sigma Tau. Maxfield co-founded ROLM Corp. in 1969 with three fellow Rice graduates and served as the company’s executive vice president and director. In 1984, ROLM merged with IBM, where Maxfield had worked previously, and he continued to serve as executive vice president until 1988. Since 1989, Maxfield has been a consulting professor in the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University and a director of Echelon Corp., which the Silicon Valley/ San Jose Business Journal ranked No. 20 on its list of the region’s 50 fastest-growing companies in 2003. Harvard Business School named the Rice co-founders of ROLM Entrepreneur of the Year in 1980, and Rice has given Maxfield three alumni honors: Distinguished Alumnus Award (2004), Outstanding Engineering Alumnus (1999), and Rice Engineering Alumni Association’s Outstanding Engineer (1964). —B. J. Almond
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— Bill Sick
In the News
— Brendan Hassett — Amy Myers Jaffe — James Kinsey — B. Paul Padley — Elora Shehabuddin — Adria Baker — Diane Butler
Sicks Endow Dean of Engineering Chair Bill Sick ’57, Rice University trustee and longtime university supporter, and his wife, Stephanie, have increased their commitment to the William and Stephanie Sick Professorship to make it the permanent chair held by Rice’s dean of engineering. Sallie Keller-McNulty is the first dean of engineering to hold the chair. Originally, the Sicks endowed a professorship in entrepreneurship, which was held by Steve Currall at the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management until he left the university last fall. With the Sicks’ recent increased commitment, the Sick Chair has become the second at Rice dedicated in perpetuity for a dean; the first is in the School of Architecture. The Sicks have given generously of their time and energies to Rice during the past 25 years. In 2003, Bill Sick received the Outstanding Engineering Alumnus Award, and he was selected for a 2006 Association of Rice Alumni Distinguished Alumni Award. He has been a member of the Board of Trustees since 1996.
Math’s Hassett Wins Almost $1 Million in Support In theoretical mathematics, progress depends not on expensive supercomputers or laboratories but on brainpower. So funding is generally given to develop and support people such as Brendan Hassett, professor of mathematics, who scored a major coup for Rice this past spring
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by winning almost $1 million in National Science Foundation (NSF) funding for postdoctoral researchers and graduate students at Rice and three other institutions. Focused research-group grants like this are among the most competitive mathematics awards handed out by the NSF. The funds will pay for a series of meetings over the next three years aimed at generating breakthroughs in a specific area of algebraic geometry that is ripe for innovation. Hassett, the principal investigator on the grant, is joined by collaborators Yuri Tschinkel of New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematics, Johan de Jong of Columbia University, and Jason Starr of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Hassett and his colleagues are interested in parametric solutions— general solutions that account for all possible specific solutions—and in finding parametric solutions not just for one equation but for an entire class of equations.
Baker Institute’s Jaffe Becomes Co-Chair of Forum As the new university co-chair of the Rice Global Engineering and Construction (E&C) Forum, Amy Myers Jaffe plans to promote greater interaction among professionals in the engineering and construction businesses and Rice faculty from a variety of disciplines. To achieve this goal, Jaffe, the Wallace S. Wilson Fellow in Energy Studies at Rice’s James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy and associate director of the Rice Energy
Program, has invited several Rice scholars to speak at monthly roundtable meetings of the E&C Forum, an organization focused solely on the discussion and study of problems and opportunities facing the contracting side of the industry. Stephen Klineberg, professor of sociology, for example, recently led a discussion on workforce trends in Houston, and Ramon Gonzalez, the WilliamW. Akers Assistant Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, has been invited to speak on the future of biofuels. Jaffe—along with E&C Forum founder Ahmad Durrani, professor of civil and environmental engineering—also helped organize the E&C Forum’s annual conference, held October 17 at the Baker Institute. This year’s theme was “Strategies for aTurbulent, Resource-Constrained World: Delivering on Tomorrow’s Contracts.”
Kinsey to Chair Welch Scientific Advisory Board James Kinsey, the D.R. Bullard-Welch Foundation Professor of Science at Rice, has been named chair of the Welch Scientific Advisory Board (SAB). Kinsey succeeds former Rice president Norman Hackerman, who had been chair of the SAB since 1982. Kinsey is aTexas native and earned his bachelor’s and doctoral degrees in chemistry from Rice in 1956 and 1959, respectively. He was the first doctoral student of Nobel laureate Robert Curl, University Professor Emeritus and the Kenneth S. PitzerSchlumberger Professor Emeritus
of Chemistry. Kinsey served as dean of the Wiess School of Natural Sciences from 1988 until 1998. He also served as interim provost of Rice from 1993 to 1994.
Particle Physicist Padley Tapped to Lead $40 Million European Project Rice physicist B. Paul Padley has been chosen to lead the scientific operations for a $40 million system of particle detectors at the European Organization for Nuclear Research’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Scheduled to begin operations next year, the LHC is poised to become the most powerful particle accelerator in the world. Housed in a sprawling 27-kilometer ring of subterranean tunnels on the border between France and Switzerland, the LHC will smash together beams of protons traveling near light speed to recreate high-energy conditions that existed during the universe’s infancy. Padley, associate professor of physics and astronomy, will lead the scientific operations of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) and one of its subsystems, the Endcap Muon System. The 13,000-ton CMS, is housed in an underground chamber in Cessy, France, just across the border from Geneva, Switzerland. The physical scale of the CMS project is matched by its human scale: the project team boasts 2,300 people from 159 scientific institutions. A goal of CMS is to detect the rapid stream of muons that will be created in the LHC. Muons are shortlived particles that act like electrons
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but are far more massive. Detection of muons is crucial at the LHC because muons will play a key role in unveiling the physics of the Higgs field and of supersymmetry, two of the collider’s primary goals.
Shehabuddin Selected as Carnegie Scholar Elora Shehabuddin, an assistant professor of humanities and political science, is among 20 leading scholars from across the nation selected as 2006 Carnegie Scholars, a prestigious fellowship awarded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York to support innovative and pathbreaking scholarship. Her Carnegie fellowship is the first for Rice University. Each of this year’s scholars will study themes focusing on Islam and the modern world. Shehabuddin’s research, titled “Women at the Muslim Center: Islamist Ideals and Democratic Exigencies,” will examine the role politically engaged Muslim women play in the transformation of Islamist politics in the 21st century. Specifically, she will study how Jamaat-i-Islami, the main Islamist party in Bangladesh, and Hezbollah, the main Islamist party in Lebanon, have regarded issues of gender and how the presence of gender issues in national public discourse is compelling the parties to change their ideologies. She hopes her study will inspire a rethinking of “our positions on one of the most contentious debates in the early years of the 21st century:
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Can Islam be supportive of democratic rights generally and women’s rights in particular?” Each of the Carnegie Scholars will receive up to $100,000 over the next two years to help fund their research.The foundation receives 100 to 150 nominations annually from designated nominators and narrows that list to 40 finalists. It ultimately awards fellowships to 20 scholars. Shehabuddin, who joined the Rice faculty in 2001, teaches regularly in the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and in the Asian Studies Program.
Group Honors Baker with Advocate of the Year Award In her 10 years leading Rice’s Office of International Students and Scholars, Adria Baker has helped countless international students and scholars secure education visas, procure funding, and adjust to life in the United States. For this work, Baker was honored by the Association of International Educators (NAFSA) with the first Advocate of the Year Award. She was recognized especially for her efforts to raise awareness of international education in the state and federal governments. Since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, international students and scholars have faced strict regulations and endured an extensive process for coming to the United States to study. As a result, some potential students were lost to other countries with less-severe requirements. As NAFSA’sTexas state whip,
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Baker was charged with keeping state and national representatives abreast of the needs of international students and the universities they would be attending in an effort to keep students from going to other countries to study. Last year, Baker successfully spearheaded Texas’s effort to pass an international education policy resolution through theTexas Senate as well as in the Texas House of Representatives in 2004. Baker also encourages and assists her colleagues to do the same in their respective states. As a result of her continued efforts on behalf of international education, Baker recently was invited by the director of Texas Homeland Security to join the Critical Infrastructure Protection Council as it addresses the Real ID Act, which directly affects all foreign visitors in Texas and throughout the United States.
Butler Takes on New Role at Fondren
Adria Baker
Diane Butler
She will help IT staff appreciate the unique needs of the library and help library staff understand the resources they depend on for their work. Specifically, she will lead and manage the library systems team, collaborate with Fondren staff and administrators to develop and implement technology solutions in all areas of the library, and work closely with IT to stay informed about university-wide initiatives and plans. Aiding her in this task will be her solid ties to Rice’s IT division, where she worked for 11 years. Butler previously worked with Fondren Library on the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, which explores the scholarly uses of the foundation’s digital archive of approximately 117,000 hours of videotaped testimony from Holocaust survivors and witnesses.
—Reported by B. J. Almond, Jade Boyd, Dawn Dorsey, and Jennifer Evans
As Rice’s Fondren Library transforms itself physically and virtually into a research library for the 21st century, Diane Butler is on the job to ensure its technology infrastructure meets the ever-changing needs of scholars and students. Butler is now assistant university librarian for library systems, a new position at Fondren, with responsibilities that include overseeing the library’s information technology operations and collaborating with Rice’s Division of Information Technology (IT).
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By George W. Webb III
New head coach Todd Graham leads resurgence of Rice football For generations, historians have debated exactly when the Renaissance began, what it encompassed, or even whether such an event occurred. But for Rice football, there is no debate: its renaissance began on January 1, 2006, when 41-year-old Todd Graham became the head coach of the Rice Owls. For Graham, the Rice renaissance is a far-reaching effort that touches every aspect of the football program. It began with an overhaul of Rice stadium, from the field up. First, the 9-year-old AstroTurf was replaced by FieldTurf, an artificial grass that provides a safer playing surface than the woven carpet of AstroTurf but has similar durability. The turf replacement also offered a chance to eliminate the 18-inch crown on the Rice field by raising the sidelines to form a flat playing surface. As Graham notes, “Now our quarterback won't have to pass to a receiver who’s a foot shorter when he runs a sideline route.” Surrounding the field, aluminum benches have replaced the old and splintering wooden benches in the lower bowl, while the field fence is painted with an eye-catching blue and gray design. And looming above the field in the north end zone is a high-tech scoreboard and video display worthy of an NFL stadium. The video screen alone stands 20 feet high by 35 feet wide and provides an opportunity for advertising revenue as well as displays crystal-clear replays and other visual information for fans. The renaissance also means new technology and equipment for the team, including digital video and plasma screens in the team’s classrooms. “Our greatest asset here at Rice is that we have smart kids,” Graham says. “We want to take advantage of that by using the latest teaching technology.” On the academic front, players now can take summer school classes at Rice on scholarship, which is something that nearly every other Division I university has allowed for years. Earning up to six credit hours
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in the summer helps student-athletes maintain a more manageable workload during the year and graduate on time, further enhancing the university’s already sterling graduation rate for athletes. While formal practices are not permitted, players can study and work out together rather than scattering to their hometowns. “The summer school program gives us the opportunity for a yearround speed and conditioning program, which means fewer injuries and faster recovery time for the players during the season,” Graham explains. “The number one thing for this team is that we don’t have a lot of depth, so we have to stay healthy.” The summer program is part of that effort, as is new strength and conditioning equipment in the John L. Cox Fitness Center. Graham also has all linemen wear protective knee braces during practice. By late August, the results of the summer program were evident: the players reported to practice stronger, faster, and more cohesive than ever. From a marketing perspective, the renaissance aims to make the Rice Owls, in Graham’s words, the “neighborhood team” of Houston. As soon as the players arrived on campus, Graham and the team spent several days knocking on doors in the neighborhoods near Rice, introducing themselves and inviting folks to come enjoy Rice football. Student involvement also is key to the program’s renewal. A couple of days before the first game of the season, Graham held a pep rally at Rice stadium attended by nearly half the student body. And at home games, the team is led onto the field by students from each college carrying their college banners. Such initiatives have been warmly received by Rice students, who have responded with an enthusiasm for Rice football not seen in several years. Perhaps most crucially, the football renaissance is sparking a renewed energy in fundraising, led by Graham himself. One of his first priorities was to create the Extra Point Club, a football-specific fundraising group. With support from President David Leebron, Graham took personal charge of the aggressive campaign that, by September, had raised nearly $6 million for Rice football. “We knew there were people who care a lot about this program,” Graham says. “People at
Rice are passionate about Rice, and we show them we have a vision and then ask them to help us achieve it.” Graham may be new to Rice, but he has at least three qualities that made him the ideal choice to lead the Owls’ head coach. First, as someone who coached in Texas high schools for eight years and recruited extensively in Texas for three years while at the University of Tulsa, Graham is steeped in Texas high school football. He agrees with baseball coach Wayne Graham that, while Rice actively seeks the best student-athletes from every part of the United States, Texas is inevitably the primary recruiting well. Second, Graham has a history of engineering remarkable turnarounds. While serving as coach and athletic director at Allen High School near Dallas, he took over a team that had been winless in its district and led it to five playoff berths in six seasons. At West Virginia University, Graham helped the Mountaineers improve from a 3–8 mark to a 9–3 record and bowl appearance in his second season. At Tulsa, Graham helped a team that had been 1–11 the previous year achieve two bowl appearances in three seasons and win the 2005 Conference USA championship. Graham’s aggressive, efficient defenses were major reasons for the sharp improvements at West Virginia and Tulsa. Finally, Graham brings to the job incomparable energy and drive. Indeed, “energy” is the word nearly everyone uses to describe him, and he combines that energy with a firm belief that Rice can excel in football as it does in other fields. Graham declares to anyone who will listen, “Anything less than being conference and bowl champions is unacceptable.” And he told the Houston Chronicle, “We have to believe that we can win. I want us to get better every day. It takes energy and work, based on foundation and belief.” On arriving at Rice, Graham quickly assembled a coaching staff whose commitment matches his own. Like Graham, the staff is young—averaging 36 years of age—and driven. His biggest coup was hiring former University of Texas at Austin standout Major Applewhite as Rice’s quarterbacks coach and offensive coordinator. Applewhite was a fiercely competitive and immensely popular quarterback for the Longhorns, compiling a 22–8 record as a starter from 1999 to 2001. Applewhite served two years as a graduate assistant at his
alma mater before becoming the quarterbacks coach at Syracuse University in 2005. “Hiring Major brought us instant credibility in terms of where we want to go offensively,” Graham says. “We want to spread the field and throw the football, and every quarterback and receiver in this state will be interested in Rice with Major as our offensive coordinator.” Applewhite admits that coming to Rice was not an obvious decision, and in fact, Syracuse gave him a very attractive offer to stay. But what Rice offered was even more attractive: the opportunity to be offensive coordinator at age 28, to help build a program from the ground up, and to move back to Texas. One challenge facing Graham and Applewhite is to overhaul the Rice offense. Since the 1990s, Rice has run the triple option, an offensive scheme that relies on the quarterback as a primary ball-carrier, along with two or three running backs. When it works well, the triple option can be a nearly unstoppable weapon, as the Owls proved in their winning seasons in 1996, 1997, and 2001. But an offense focused almost entirely on the running game makes it difficult to recruit top-level high school players, who generally are used to a more balanced attack. In time, the scheme limited what Rice could achieve. Graham’s mandate is to develop an offense that allows Rice to perform well on the field and to recruit successfully for the future. To that end, Applewhite has installed the spread formation, in which the offense lines up with three or more receivers, wide splits between the offensive linemen, and a single running back. The quarterback is typically in the shotgun position, five or so yards behind the line of scrimmage. By forcing the defense to cover many threats on a wide front, the spread creates gaps for both the running game and the passing game. Rice runs the spread as a no-huddle offense, which further keeps the defense off balance. “The key to our offense is that it spreads the defense out,” Applewhite explains. “They have to cover the full width of the field. And if they blitz, the blitz is coming from farther away, which gives our quarterback more time to read and react.”
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The new scheme required adjustment by the entire team, especially at quarterback. On the strength of his stellar performance in spring practice, sophomore Chase Clement earned the starting role over junior Joel Armstrong. Armstrong, meanwhile, has emerged as a talented receiver as well as a valuable back-up at quarterback. On the defensive side, Graham puts a premium on aggressiveness. The Owls blitz early and often—an admittedly risky strategy. “Our defense occasionally will give up yards in bunches,” Graham says. “But we also are going to make the big plays that stop the other team cold.” If the first eight games of the season are any indication, the Graham renaissance is taking hold. The new excitement about Rice football brought more than 23,000 to the stands for the Owls’ opening game against the University of Houston. The fans saw Rice fall behind early and then regroup to score 30 unanswered points against the favored Cougars before falling 31–30. The next week began a brutal stretch of four consecutive away games, the first three without Clement, who was injured against Houston. The Owls turned in a creditable showing in a 26–16 loss to the University of California at Los Angeles, a team that defeated Rice by 42 points in 2005. The Owls’ aggressive defense did indeed yield yards in bunches, but it also forced four turnovers and held four Bruin drives to field goals. After lopsided losses to No. 8 Texas and No. 18 Florida State University, the Owls suffered a different kind of setback. On September 25, the day after the Florida State game, freshman defensive back Dale Lloyd collapsed on the field during a light afternoon workout. Rice’s emergency medical service responded immediately, and though Lloyd was quickly transported to
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Memorial Hermann Hospital, he was pronounced dead the next morning. The cause of death remains undetermined. Lloyd’s death hit the team hard. Graham considered canceling the Owls’ next game at Army, but after speaking with the team captains and other veteran coaches and receiving the blessing of Lloyd’s family, Graham felt it was important to go forward with the game. “I think that is what Dale would want us to do,” Graham said at the time. “That’s
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“Our defense occasionally will give up yards in bunches, but we also are going to make the big plays that stop the other team cold.” —Todd Graham the type of player he was.” In the wake of the tragedy, the Owls turned in their best performance of the year, a resounding 48–14 victory at West Point. In his first game since the UH match, Clement threw a schoolrecord five touchdown passes and was named Conference USA Player of the Week. The Owls attended Lloyd’s funeral in Houston the next day. The team is honoring their fallen
teammate this season by wearing his number 39 on their helmets. Rice also has established the Dale Lloyd II Memorial Scholarship, which will benefit a Rice student-athlete. After stumbling at Tulane the next week, the Owls pulled off a last-second win at home against the University of Alabama at Birmingham, then knocked off conference runner-up University of Central Florida on the road. Rice entered its lone off week with a 3–5 record (2–2 in Conference USA). Since returning to action, Clement has the Rice offense firing on all cylinders. In just five games this year, he already has thrown 14 touchdown passes, the third highest season total in Rice history. His primary target is sophomore wide receiver Jarrett Dillard. In eight games, Dillard has caught 60 passes for 769 yards and 12 touchdowns, shattering the Rice single-season record of nine touchdown catches held by Kenneth Roy since 1976. With 17 receiving touchdowns to date in his young career, Dillard is just one shy of the Rice career record. Leading the ground attack is senior running back Quinton Smith, an all-conference selection and the Owls’ 2005 Most Valuable Player. So far in 2006, Smith has rushed for 667 yards in eight games and caught for 203 more. His 2,076 career rushing yards make him the fifth leading rusher in Rice history. In a testament to how well the Rice players have adjusted to their new system, the Owls have averaged just six penalties per game, compared to 17 by their opponents. But the system itself is a testament to the energy, planning, and implementation behind it. The Rice football renaissance has begun not simply with changes but with promise, and the Rice community is eager to cheer it on.
Engineering and Music Go Hand–in–Hand Mary Ng Dooley, who earned her BA in art and art history from Rice University in 1983, felt privileged not only to have been accepted to Rice, but also to have her tuition and expenses covered by a combination of a scholarship and grants.
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ary comes from an immigrant family that struggled to adapt to the world of 1960s rural Texas. Her Rice scholarship changed her socioeconomic destiny, she says, and because of that, she feels a duty to help enable the education of future Rice students. Inspired by previous alumni such as Burton and Deedee McMurtry, Mary established the need-based Don Shek and York Ling Ng Scholarship in 2002 not only to reciprocate her gift of education from Rice but also to honor her parents. Mary’s mother passed away later that year. Today, the modest scholarship is a testament to the values of Mary’s family, which include remembering the people and the institutions that provide formative experiences and assisting people
in need regardless of one’s personal or financial status. Recently, Mary made a bequest through her will to further benefit the Don Shek and York Ling Ng Scholarship. The reason? While there always will be worthy philanthropic efforts, Mary chooses to support organizations that withstand time, such as museums, schools, and community foundations. In addition, she sees Rice University as an incubator for tomorrow’s intellectual, business, and public management leaders. Mary strongly believes that the essence of giftgiving is in the act of giving rather than in the amount of a gift. For her, participation in the well-being of future Rice students carries on a tradition of making Rice affordable to exceptional students of modest means as well as honoring her own gift of a world-class education.
For more information about this fund or about making charitable gifts to Rice through your estate, please contact the Office of Gift Planning for gift illustrations and calculations tailored to your situation.
Phone: 713–348–4624
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Email: giftplan@rice.edu
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Website: www.giving.rice.edu/giftplanning
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